One of the guiding principles for actors is said to be ‘never work with children or animals‛. I guess it‛s because however good an actor you may be, you are always going to be upstaged by the enchanting tots or the furry friends.
Well I am going to tell you about a great annual event at a church where I was once vicar that was a superfest of children and one very special animal, and how it rapidly became an occasion where, even if it might have been possible, no one had the slightest desire to do any upstaging.
It was in the early 1980‛s when churches were really making an effort to make their services more friendly to all ages, and I turned my mind to what we put on for children at Christmas time.
I had inherited a rather dull children‛s midweek carol service which was sparsely attended by just a few children of church families. So I got a small group together in September and we decided to give the whole thing a facelift:
it would be on Christmas Eve at 4pm
it would last only about 40 minutes
the carols would be a mix of trad and mod and
we would support the Children‛s Society charity by doing their special Christingle
service – the one where oranges are decorated with candles and fruit and given to all the children who come.
Just as a bit of a sideline I told the group about a couple who lived on a farm on the edge of the parish who had said that they had a lovely donkey called Strawberry that we could borrow any time we wanted. Everyone agreed that I should book the donkey immediately.
But what is a donkey at Christmas without a Mary, a Joseph and a baby Jesus? Why not go the whole way, I thought, and get a holy family together along with their mode of transport? Actually getting that family group sorted wasn‛t as hard as it might seem as I was also chaplain of the local maternity hospital so I got good notice of local new born babies.
By the beginning of December it was all arranged and we had even been given a bit of press coverage in advance by a local paper that sent a photographer to accompany me on my first visit to Strawberry on her farm. She was a delight to meet; and she had been specially dried out for a couple of days in a stable, then groomed and kitted out with a very ethnic woven blanket and two enormous paniers. She really did look the ticket for a first-century trot to Bethlehem.
The day came, fortunately not wet or windy, and with an optimistic 50 oranges decorated and an area of the church set up as a stable with straw on the floor as our friends rolled up with Strawberry in a horsebox to meet her holy family.
What I couldn‛t have reckoned for was that on meeting Strawberry, the new dad, aka Joseph for the night, admitted that he thought he was allergic to donkeys! Immediately he proved the point with five loud sneezes and streaming eyes. But the show had to go on.
Continued on Christmas Eve…
Illustration used with kind permission of Alex Merry http://alexmerryart