I love church Christmas plays and pageants. Of course, maybe I like them so much because I'm not in charge of organizing and corraling a bunch of little kids in costumes! Christmas plays can get crazy! This year, at our church here in Kansas, they have a fabulous way of putting on a great pageant without a pulling your hair out fuss.
Monday after school a bunch of families met at a little farm out of town loaded with as many sheperds and angel costumes as we could dig up. I think there were about 15-20 kids, most of which were lower elementary and preschool ages.
First, all the kids dressed up as angels and then all the parents took pictures out in a the grassy yard.
Then some of the boy angels changed into sheperd costumes and the kids started acting out the Christmas story. Here the angels are waking up the sheperds. Yip laid down in a big bunch of sand burrs that covered his backside...poor kid!
Then three sheperds changed into Wise Men and more poses were struck and pictures were taken. (BTW, those Hogwarts robes did a great double duty as sheperds robes!) Of course there were scenes with Mary, Joseph and a donkey and plenty more of the sheperds, angels and Wise Men.
Finally all the kids met in the barn for a very organized (yeah, right) photo session of the manger scene. Once we got home all the parents sent all the digital photos to Sue who will organize this mess into a slide show for Sunday morning church service. With all the parents shooting photos it was neat to way to get tons of shots from different points of view in a short amount of time. Sue is also heading to a sheep farm to take some photos to add into the slide show later. This way the kids will also get to see themselves in the slide show.
I thought this was an awesome way to have a pageant, especially with little kids. This way of having the kids change clothes made it seem we had a lot more kids than we did. Although it took about an hour after school, I think it was much simpler than trying to get everyone happy and cooperative for twenty minutes on a Sunday morning.
Is your church braving the craziness of a Christmas pageant this year?
Is your church braving the craziness of a Christmas pageant this year?
I adore that and want to come next year! It seems so special to have it outdoors! How special and what a lovely memory to make.
ReplyDeleteGREAT IDEA! Oh yes, Sacred Heart has a Christmas pageant, and you need to get there an hour early to get a good photographer's seat. Mrs. B. has it all down to a well-oiled machine, and we all snap away. A funny story... a few years back, it seemed like we all had new cameras, so we spent the hour wait by snapping, looking, changing settings, and snapping again. Just as the pageant started, we were ready....then someone turned the lights down! UGH! You could hear us all grown and frantically fiddling with our setting buttons again
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