Advent Pasts of My Childhood.

          The Advents of my past began with practices for the upcoming Christmas Seasonal performances.  Upon the return to school and Sunday School after Thanksgiving, we were given scripts, music and rehearsal schedules and lesson plans in both settings were arranged around the necessary preparations.  
        In elementary school in the forties in Great Falls, Montana, I guess it was taken for granted that whether you attended church or not, you were Christian and would participate. There might have been some objections, but being ethno-culturally challenged myself, I was unaware of them.  Everyone in my classes learned and sang both secular and religious Christmas music and spoke the lines that were assigned to them with confidence or trepidation.  

            Both our instruction time and content during the month of December wrapped around this holiday season, which seemed only normal since family and community life did too.  Our artwork of Christmas stockings and trees, Santa’s, candy canes, stars, as well as nativity figures and scenes decorated our classrooms.  We learned about the history of the Holiday and read the classic literature of our annual traditions.  We made cards and gifts and discussed the upcoming party.

            Songs were practiced in our individual classrooms, combined grade level classes, and, during the last week, in the gym where we marched in took our seats, stood up at the music teacher’s gestures and took our turns singing.  After all the practices, I missed the first three years’ performances because I was ill, with measles, mumps, and German measles in successive years.  The fourth year, I had a cold, but declared I would be there no matter what. 

At Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, we had fewer practice sessions to be ready for the pageant.  I mostly remember singing in those black skirts, white tops with big black bow ties at the neck.  Later, when I was in the Junior High Chapel Choir, we had our own plum colored robes.  In fourth grade I was Mary, which wasn’t as exciting as it sounded as I had to sit on a chair staring at the doll in the manger throughout the whole program.  My dad said I did a lot of wiggling around which I imagine I did.  I doubt that Mary just sat there all the time and I think it would have been more realistic to have my own doll that cried when you moved it, took water from a little bottle into a hole in its mouth and had to have the wet rag diaper changed.  But who am I to change tradition?  At one church I belonged to in my adult years, one of the newest babies in the congregation arrived from the other side of draped box at the moment Mary “brought forth her first-born son” and proceeded to steal the show.  Which, after all the waiting, expectation and preparation for Christmas, is as it should be.  Right?