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Christmas
An Opportunity To Share The Good News With Our Neighbours
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The idea of organising a nativity on the streets of the housing estate where I lived had come to me some months previously. The first year I had moved into my parish of St Vincent's, I had organised a nativity play for the children in the church. It had been a great success, and far from children dropping out, as I had feared, numbers had grown, as the cast had brought their friends along, who wanted to be in it too. Some people never get to hear the Christmas story It occurred to me that most nativity plays, like the one I did, are put on in Christian schools or churches, so many people in our increasingly secularised society today never get to hear the Christmas story any more. And how will people know if someone doesn't tell them? Why not take the story outside I thought. Instead of the audience sitting in seats they could follow the action on foot and witness the various scenes, starting with the Annunciation at Mary's house, and then join Mary and Joseph as they rode on the donkey round the estate, stopping at various houses ("inns") before ending up at the stable at Bethlehem with fireworks, carols and mulled wine on the small green, at the back of the block where I lived. I had been looking for an activity that the teenagers on the estate could work on, and it occurred to me, that maybe I could get some of them involved too. They were a bit difficult to convince. A few of them did agree to help me create some posters, which we delivered telling people what was planned and some helped to paint the crib. On their suggestion, we called the event "An old fashioned Christmas". Name calling and ridicule I suppose I was a little naïve thinking I could get actually get teenage boys in this day and age into costume, and I was told firmly that I should look to my church connections for performers, which I did, calling on our fun club. It was a bit difficult at the dress rehearsal as the poor children had to put up with all sorts of name calling and ridicule from some of the hard boys on the estate when they saw what we were doing. I wondered what was going to happen on the day itself and whether we were putting the parish children under an unfair spotlight? Ecumenical dimension - moslems too! The organisation of everything turned out to be a pretty mamouth undertaking and there were many late nights and stresses as people tried to fit the preparations for the production into their already busy schedules. But God showed his hand and even weaknesses turned into strengths. When I found we had nowhere to rehearse as our parish hall was booked solid, the local Baptist church on the estate lent us theirs. When we found we didn't have enough parish children willing to take part, we managed to co-opt the children's choir of a nearby small African Pentecostal Church as our angelic choir. And when, the night before, we found they hadn't made their costumes we were able to borrow the cassocks of a friendly Anglican church, with net curtains for wings. Thus without any formal planning, it turned into a truly ecumenical collaboration!/p>
Christmas spirit! The event seemed to bring out the Christmas spirit in all kinds of people. To my amazement a Battersea company lent us the professional portable spotlights we needed free of charge and a local charity supplied a crate of red wine for our mulled wine. The bulk of the work, however, fell on parishoners and friends, who helped with the rehearsals, sewed the costumes, built the crib, supplied the candles for the candlelit procession and provided the microphones and loud hailers needed for outside performance.
Nostalgia for goodness and lost innocence It really was a magical experience for us all touching those of faith and none. A card was handed to me afterwards from someone on the estate I didn't know, thanking everyone for giving them a special "old fashioned Christmas". I realised that there is something about the Christmas story that taps into people's nostalgia for lost innocence, for goodness, for different values even if they are no longer formal Christian believers. It's important to keep this feeling alive in our culture to provide fertile ground for the gospel message. Festivals like Christmas which have cultural as well as spiritual roots are an ideal occasion to share what we believe in a way that people of our generation are open to. As the pope says in urging us to the new evangelisation, we must look for new methods and ways of preaching the good news of the gospel - organising this little nativity, I found to be an effective and fun, if rather tiring, way of doing this!
We had only rehearsed the children twice, but they were very good and absolutely loved it. The whole thing was quite magical. We have a swimming pool in the garden and we had Mary sitting beside this, pretending her house was by a river. Then we moved everyone to the other side of the garden for the scene with the shepherds. They were sitting under the palm tree warming their hands over a real fire - which was barbecue thing, very common here in Portugal. We had made lots of pretend sheep, which we stuck on skewers around them. Then we turned the fairy lights on and the angels came in, bouncing on the trampoline. We turned our basement garage into the stable at Bethlehem and filled it with bales of hay and laid out chairs so everyone could come and sit down and sing carols round the crib. Then afterwards we moved upstairs to the house and served mulled wine and people brought food to share. Everyone was really touched by it all. There is nothing sweeter and more innocent than children doing the Christmas story, and people told me afterwards that it had been the high point of their Christmas activities. It put meaning back into Christmas for them and, as many of them were ex-pats, it created a sense of family for them when they were far away from home, and was a way of showing them love and care.
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"He's
coming, he's coming!" I still remember the excitement on the
children's faces as the big van carrying Noel, the donkey, the star
of our nativity pageant, was spotted arriving on the estate. It had
been touch and go whether Noel would arrive or not. The horse box
had broken down and as it was too far for him to walk, the director
of the city farm had suggested that she might bring a couple of rabbits
instead! Fortunately, one of the parishoners had managed to find a
riding stables with an empty horse box, which had been dispatched
to fetch Noel. 
