My dear friend
I’m sure I’ve told you my ‘Childhood Christmas Pageant Story’ before, but I can’t find where, so I can’t simply link and let you decide whether or not to read or leave. However, I want to tell you my ‘Grown-up Christmas Pageant Story’ and if I haven’t told you my ‘Childhood Christmas Pageant Story’ then my ‘Grown-up Christmas Pageant Story’ won’t make sense. So I’ve pasted in the section from last year’s Annual, World Famous, One Night Only Live Christmas Letter Reading where I know I told my ‘Childhood Christmas Pageant Story.’ If you’ve already heard it too many times, you can scroll down to the bit where I’ve put a bolded heading Grown-up Christmas Pageant Story.
Oh, and while we’re on the topic of my Annual, World Famous, One Night Only Live Christmas Letter Reading, it’s on again this year. It was so much fun last year, and this year, Maggie is joining me on stage. Here’s a link if you’d like to come along:
And now without further ado:
Childhood Christmas Pageant Story
In our first years in Port Pirie our family took part in the Christmas pageant. Dad was in the National Trust and we represented them. The float’s theme changed every year, but the basic format stayed the same. Dad driving the car and pulling the trailer on which some combination of my mother, my brother and I created a tableau.
One year, Jack and Jill. What that had to do with the National Trust or even Christmas I don’t know. Mum made costumes for my brother (Jack) and me (Jill), Dad built a well using bricks left at the house when we got the salt damp fixed. Dad and his mate—fuelled by Southwark they drank from longnecks—stacked the bricks one on top of the other at diagonal angles. Two poles—garden stakes—held a small canopy with a cardboard canopy and a metal bucket. As we drove through the Port Pirie streets waving to the crowd, we held tight to those poles, the only things we could use to balance as the car stopped with a thud and started with a jerk. Bricks would occasionally fall, not always missing our feet, and our hands got splinters, but we kept waving.
My favourite float was Little Red Riding Hood. My parents’ cast iron bed was pushed and pulled onto the trailer, again by Dad and his mate, again Southwark longnecks again in hand. Mum was in the bed, dressed as the wolf who was dressed as the Grandmother. She made a papier mache wolf’s head. It looked amazing, but I stuck my head inside and the smell of the glue made me dizzy. I’m going to guess, but not assume, that my mother was hungover that morning which would have made the smell of the glue not only dizzying but nauseating too. Hardly surprising then that the wolf’s head spent most of the time at the end of the bed. A rather grisly picture for a Christmas pageant.
I, naturally, was Little Red Riding Hood, my brother the woodcutter, dressed in braces and a hat and carrying an actual woodcutter-sized axe the one my parents used to chop the firewood. It was easier holding on to the bed than it was the splintery garden stakes. We still had to take care because by now the bottom of the trailer was rusty and it was easy to accidentally put your foot through one of the rusting patches. And because my brother at eight years old was carrying an adult-sized axe.
Grown-up Christmas Pageant Story
My dear friend, as you know, every now and then I play the role of corporate wife. I play the role poorly, but one thing I always enjoy about these occasions is the silent auction. In November last year, I was at such an event, and one of the prizes in the silent auction was for two people to be clowns in the next Christmas Pageant.
I won.
I paid too much—well as you know, an easy way to raise funds is to give me a couple of chardonnays and point me to the silent auction. I texted my brother and said, ‘Do you want to be my wingman?’ and he said, ‘Fk, yes.’ I said to the mister when we got home, ‘I can’t believe I won that,’ and he said as he always does after silent auctions, ‘Did you win it? Or did you buy it?’
I only paid the reserve price for it—I can’t believe not a single other person bid on it—and this year, my brother and I were clowns in the Christmas Pageant. We had so much fun. It’s quite the undertaking, with a night at clown school, an online certificate and a costume fitting all beforehand.
At every stage, you are reminded that the clowns and the elves are the glue that hold the pageant together. There’s a small group of them between every float and it’s their job to make sure that the space between the floats feels like its own little performance and not a space. ‘Being a clown is the best,’ everyone says. And they are telling the truth. Being a clown in the Christmas pageant is freaking awesome.
On the morning of the pageant, everyone who is in the pageant turns up to the campus where all our costumes are delivered and we go through the makeup lines and we collect our props and we are transformed into our characters. This is my favourite part: the transformation is so complete that everyone is just wandering around dressed like a clown or a sugarplum fairy or a toy soldier or an elf and you really do feel like you have landed in Christmas land. My other favourite part was making sure that as we walked I waved hello to the children who were tired or hanging out in the back rows and they would have a look of ‘who, me?’ My other favourite part was of pointing to the families who had come dressed in matching Christmas t-shirts or jumpers and saying to them, ‘You get the prize for best-dressed family.’ Chuffed. They were the very definition of chuffed. My other favourite part was how many grown up adults—after I had waved at the children around them or made a joke or told them ‘happy Christmas’—said to me, ‘have a happy Christmas’ in a way that made me feel they really meant it.
But my most favourite part was just hanging out with my brother and watching him be such a fabulous clown and thinking about how our mum and dad had no idea about this gift they had given us.
After the pageant
The Christmas pageant marks the start of the Christmas season, so I went to the shed and got the boxes of decorations out. And thanked the mister for getting the big box with the tree inside. I’m pleased to report that we’d left everything in a pretty tidy state and the lights for the tree didn’t even get tangled. For the outside lights we just have to flick the switch, because we didn’t take them down (I like to have them there for the winter solstice).
Every year, I buy myself one or two new Christmas things. I have learnt over the years that you have to time these things. Too early, and not all of the stock has arrived, too late and all of the best things have gone. This year, I got the timing just right, and the shops were all fully stocked. But I also got a reminder to slow down on the consumerism, because one minute you’re sending joy-filled messages to your friend saying you can’t wait to share a Christmas fiano in one of your new Christmas glasses:
and the next minute, you’re back from a day out working for the man and you see things not quite as you left them:
An incident that happened when slicing mango apparently. I’m thinking of making Christmas dioramas if I can find some cute enough mini figures. Anyway, it seemed symbolic enough that I took it as a sign to stop adding to the consumerist frenzy, and I didn’t make any more trips to the shops in search of Christmas decorations.
That’s the end of the stories about the Christmas pageant.
Paying attention
I know that this is a letter of little substance. I’ve written it only for entertainment—yours and mine. I hope you know that when I say I seek to entertain, I do not mean that I intend to be a diversion, to divert your attention from important things. There is a great deal at the moment to which we must give our attention in both thought and in action. We must march and write and make noise.
One of my favourite’s of Grace Paley’s poems is this:
News
although we would prefer to talk
and talk it into psychological the-
ory the prevalence of small genocides
or the recent disease floating
toward us from another continent we
must not while she speaks her eyes
frighten us she is only one person
she tells us the terrible news we
want to leave the room we may not
we must listen in this wrong world this
is what we must do we must bear it
Until next time
If you are interested, I will tell you next about my drawing assessment. About my first semester, now complete, of learning to draw. Unless I forget that’s what I intended to tell you and end up telling you something else instead.
Sent with love
From your friend
Tracy xx
Oh man I hadn’t heard that story before and I read it with tears of laughter until the line about it being such a gift from your mum and dad and they became tears of the more regular kind
Sending you so much love. What an awesome pair of clowns x
Being a serial university attendee I will wait impatiently to hear about your first semester. Love that you were in the pageant 😍