The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

The Herdman children appeared in two other books: The Best Halloween Ever and The Best School Year Ever. While each of the wildly popular books in the series contains moral lessons and social commentary, the Herdman children’s antics make the stories so irresistible.

The Herdmans are hard-luck children without ambition or plans, but they are charming in their own way. Robinson’s portrayal of the Herdmans is similar to Roald Dahl’s depictions of other terrible children. Dahl also shared Robinson’s tendency to mock most of the adults in his stories. Dahl understood that children may be innocent, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be cruel, petty, and manipulative, often with hilarious results. The Herdmans’ love of pranks and one-upmanship would be right at home if they were the children of the characters in Dahl’s The Twits. They would also fit neatly into the grotesque group of children who tour Willy Wonka’s factory in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Most of their behavior is at odds with the upstanding, if equally unlucky, siblings of beloved classics like Gertrude Warner’s The Boxcar Children and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s sisters in the Little House on the Prairie series. The Herdmans are not merely aggressive, exasperating, hilarious, and unruly, but they are also creative. They use their ingenuity mainly to devise imaginative torments of other children, but their schemes are clever enough to have appeared in John Fitzgerald’s series The Great Brain, which celebrated the cunning detective work of another young mischief maker.

The Herdmans also belong to a tradition of books and films that use the misbehavior of children as a counterpoint to the solemn traditions and hypocrisies of the Christmas season. The Herdmans are difficult for the town to manage, but their behavior is even more scandalous in the midst of a Christmas pageant. The mood they create is closer to Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas than to the sentimental tone of a book like Richard Paul Evans’s The Christmas Box.

With its accompanying joy, greed, business, financial worry, and commercialization, Christmas provides a rich canvas for the shenanigans of unruly children. In the 1983 film A Christmas Story, Ralphie Parker is driven wild by his lust for a BB gun. It’s another story in which the bad behavior of children and adults is the highlight, as opposed to the pure sentimentality and religious message of many mainstream Christmas works.

Ultimately, the Herdmans learn a valuable lesson while participating in their community in a non-antagonistic role. They also help their community adjust their perspective about their family, the pageant, and their beliefs. In many stories about terrible children, the major satisfaction comes when they get their well-deserved punishment. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it is easy to cheer when Veruca Salt and the other horrible kids are allegedly dumped into the incinerator. However, in Robinson’s books about the Herdmans, the payoff comes with the children retaining their irrepressible nature and bringing good to others despite their best (or worst) efforts.