38 pages • 1 hour read
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
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BetaChapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Mrs. Armstrong patronizingly tells the narrator’s mother how to do everything for the pageant, as if she’s never heard of the Christmas story herself. She reminds the narrator’s mother that “every single person in the pageant is just as important as every other person—that the littlest baby angel is just as important as Mary” (25). Mrs. Armstrong always starts by casting Mary. Then, she gives the narrator’s mother all of Mary’s qualifications and characteristics as if she is the only one who knows.
On Sunday, she announces that they’ll have five rehearsals. Her son, Charlie, doesn’t want to be a shepherd and threatens to get sick. The kids then waste time wondering aloud about who will replace anyone who gets ill. When she asks who would like to volunteer to play Mary, only Imogene raises her hand. Her brother, Ralph, wants to be Joseph.
The narrator feels like her mother is behind a glass wall during a stickup. When asked, Alice confirms she doesn’t want to volunteer. Ralph, Claude, and Ollie Herdman volunteer to be the Wise Men, and Gladys, the youngest Herdman, will be the Angel of the Lord. The other kids suddenly don’t want to be shepherds because Gladys will deliver them the news of Christ’s birth.
The narrator knows that Imogene threatened Alice and told her not to volunteer; she told Alice that she would stick a pussy willow in her ear and it would grow and stick out of her head her entire life. Mrs. Armstrong accepts the blame for this fiasco since she wasn’t there to stop the narrator’s mother from losing control. This infuriates her mother, who is now determined to make it the best pageant ever. Reverend Hopkins tells everyone to quit complaining. He says that when Jesus said “Suffer the little children to come unto me” (37), he also meant the Herdmans. They will start rehearsals on Wednesday.
Chapter 4 Summary
The kids pay attention at rehearsal to ensure they see everything the Herdmans do. The narrator’s mother says, “‘And here’s the Herdman family. We’re glad to see you all,’ which was probably the biggest lie ever said out loud in the church” (38).
The narrator watches them: “Imogene smiled—the Herdman smile, we called it—and there they sat, the closest thing to criminals that we knew about, and they were going to represent the best and most beautiful. No wonder everybody was so worked up” (39).
The Herdmans have lots of questions. Leroy asks where shepherds come from. Ollie asks what a shepherd is. Claude says he doesn’t know what an inn is. It’s quickly apparent that the Herdmans don’t know the Christmas story, and Alice isn’t surprised. She remembers Gladys and Ollie drew mustaches on the disciples in the illustrated Bible last Sunday.
The narrator’s mother talks them all through the Christmas story. The older kids laugh when Ralph yells that Mary is “pregnant” (41). Alice says it’s not nice to say Mary is pregnant. She says she’ll have to tell her mother about this blasphemous environment.
The narrator has to sit by Imogene, and she notices that the Herdmans pay attention to all the answers to their questions. Imogene is horrified that they wouldn’t make room at the inn for Jesus. Ralph says he would have told the innkeeper that the baby was going to be Jesus. Imogene says Gladys slept in a bureau drawer as if that explains Jesus sleeping in a manger. Claude asks about the “wadded-up clothes” (44). The narrator realizes she didn’t know what swaddling clothes were until then. Imogene wants to know why Child Welfare didn’t intervene.
As the Christmas story progresses, Imogene is not impressed with the Wise Men’s gifts because a baby doesn’t need fancy oils. She is also horrified by King Herod’s execution order. The Herdmans demand to know why everyone obeyed him. The narrator briefly wonders if Herod was a Herdman, but she realizes she was mistaken. The Herdmans don’t admire Herod; they want him in the play so they can beat him up:
I couldn’t understand the Herdmans. You would have thought the Christmas story came right out of the F.B.I. files, they got so involved in it—wanted a bloody end to Herod, worried about Mary having her baby in a barn, and called the Wise Men a bunch of dirty spies (47).
When the rehearsal ends, the Herdmans are arguing about whether Joseph should have burned down the inn.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Chapters 3 and 4 show the Herdmans starting to get some credit from other people, although no one expects the rehearsals to go well:
The first pageant rehearsal was usually about as much fun as a three-hour ride on the school bus, and just as noisy and crowded. This rehearsal, though, was different. Everybody shut up and settled down right away, for fear of missing something awful the Herdmans might do (38).
They’re watching the Herdmans as if they’re specimens in a zoo. Alice’s sulking surveillance reinforces the theme of Perspective and Judgment and, more specifically, pre-conceived prejudices. She is close-minded and unwilling to notice that the Herdmans are trying to understand the story.
They pay such close attention that they ask questions that have never occurred to the narrator. She is shocked when Imogene says, “What was the matter with Joseph that he didn’t tell them? Her pregnant and everything” (43). However, it’s a fair question. Even Imogene, with her hard life and absent parents, knows that most people don’t ignore pregnant women in distress.
They save most of their confusion for King Herod, the wicked man who decreed that the children should be killed so that no one could usurp him: “‘We don’t show Herod in our pageant,’ Mother said. And they all got mad. They wanted somebody to be Herod so they could beat up on him” (47). The narrator realizes that the Herdmans have defied her expectations. Rather than finding common ground with Herod, they’re appalled. The narrator has never given much thought to Herod other than him being the villain of the story.
The Herdmans ask questions according to their instincts. They learn from the story and the answers to their questions. The narrator finds it increasingly hard to root against them, and her mother feels similarly. The Herdmans may be anti-social and mean, but they understand real evil when they see it. They want to beat Herod up, not applaud him. By engaging with the Christmas story from a place of complete ignorance, the Herdmans’ reactions expand the narrator’s personal perspective, adding another element to the theme: the importance of reconsidering a topic, in this case elements of the Christmas story not usually given much attention.
The theme of Tradition is amplified through Mrs. Armstrong’s advice to the narrator’s mother. Mrs. Armstrong believes that tradition should be maintained in the pageant, which translates to casting Alice as Mary since she always plays that role. She fully expects the narrator’s mother to do things as they have always been done. However, this is impossible because the participation of the Herdmans guarantees that the norms of tradition will not dominate this year. This upheaval drives the plot and will lead to changes in perspective and the Redemption of Imogene.
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