Advent & Christmas eResources No-Rehearsal Christmas Pageant

Are you fed up with crazy Christmas pageant preparations?  Here is a simple, joy-filled alternative.

After more than fifteen years leading faith formation and at least as many Children’s Christmas Pageants, I discovered a new mantra for Advent: “Less hectic... more holy”

Like most catechetical leaders, I used to spend the entire month of December running around like a madwoman gathering costumes, finding or writing scripts, trying to schedule rehearsal times that didn’t make everyone crazy and basically turning myself inside out to create the world’s most “perfect” Christmas pageant... Ha!! Year after year, I was exhausted by all the work that went into the pageant, but always amazed by how touched I was during the actual pageant, watching how the children reacted to this special story.

A couple of years ago, I discovered a new format that made my life so much easier!

First, I realized that no matter how much we rehearsed (which wasn’t ever that much) there was always going to be some element of chaos in the Children’s Christmas pageant – it was simply the “nature of the beast”.

Secondly, I realized that the chaos and unpredictability was part of the charm of the pageant and that people loved it anyway. So I took a leap of faith and said we were going to do a Christmas pageant with absolutely NO rehearsals. After all, Mary and Joseph didn’t have rehearsals and they were certainly touched by the story!

This resource includes:

• Step-by-step directions from advanced planning up to the day of the event.
• Sample bulletin/newsletter articles
• Sample volunteer sign up sheet
• Sample letter to parents
• Pageant script
• Sample worship aide/program