The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

The narrator’s mother is a humorous composite of every long-suffering person who has ever taken a benign assignment with great reluctance. She is forced to put a good face on running the Christmas pageant, but she is exasperated with the project even before the Herdmans join. Relative to the theme of Tradition, the narrator’s mother is a creature of routine: She cares for her children and husband and gossips with friends. When she takes over the pageant, she is reluctant because she already thinks she knows what it will mean: She has to make sure that the same old thing that happens every year also happens this year.

After beginning rehearsals, “[b]y Sunday, mother [is] sick of the whole thing” (27), but the Herdmans change that. Their questions, in particular, make her think more deeply about her knowledge of the Christmas story. When she tells her husband about their reaction to King Herod, she says, “They picked out the right villain—that must mean something” (50). Like her daughter, she is giving the Herdmans credit for something positive, making her question whether she might have done so sooner if she had been more open-minded about them. However, this is not to say that she had hopes for the actual performance, stating, “When it was all over, she might want to go someplace and hide” (70). 

Alice Wendleken is the narrator’s friend, a girl “who [is] so nasty-clean that she had detergent hands by the time she was four years old” (11). Alice is a judgmental girl who usually plays Mary in the Christmas pageant “because she’s so smart, so neat and clean, and, most of all, so holy-looking” (18). When the narrator’s mother takes over the pageant, Alice’s first worry is nepotism: She hopes the narrator’s mother won’t just give her the role of Mary because she can.

Alice is pious and pretentious, but she is also bitter and jealous after Imogene takes the role from her. She represents the effort and commitment it takes to remain closed-minded despite contrary evidence. The Herdmans don’t become suave cosmopolites throughout the story, but they do pay attention, try hard, and grow. Instead of acknowledging this, Alice spends rehearsals making a list of faults, errors, and improprieties that she can use to tattle on the Herdmans in the hopes that she’ll be able to reprise her role.

Her desperation for the role is still there on the night of the pageant: “She had even put Vaseline on her eyelids, so they would shine in the candlelight and everyone would say, ‘Who is that lovely girl in the angel choir? Why isn’t she Mary?” (61). Instead of changing her perspective, she suspects Leroy of stealing the ham he brings for Jesus after receiving it as a gift from the charitable works committee.

Imogene is the oldest girl in the Herdman family. She is the same age as the narrator, who introduces Imogene as being just like the others: “As far as anyone could tell, Imogene was just like the rest of the Herdmans. She never learned anything either, except dirty words and secrets about everybody” (8). She is the only Herdman character that is purposefully well-developed, and she experiences the most dramatic narrative arc of all the characters. She also receives far more time on the page than the other Herdmans.

Imogene is like a villain from a comic book. In the narrator’s initial descriptions, she describes Imogene as having an uncanny knack for blackmail, extortion, intimidation, and creative threats. She learns everyone’s weight and uses it to embarrass them at every chance. She smokes cigars and fights tooth and nail with her brothers. She is tough, but that is part of Imogene’s tragic young life: She is tougher than she should have to be because she doesn’t have parents or authority figures to guide her. She and her siblings survive in a town that doesn’t want them. When she takes the role of Mary from Alice, it’s a triumphant coup, but Imogene is determined to do the part justice. The more she learns about Mary, Jesus, and their perilous situation on the night of his birth, the more protective she becomes. During a rehearsal, she shouts at the Wise Men, “Don’t touch him! I named him Jesus!” (62).

Imogene is the only Herdman who shows real vulnerability. At the end of the pageant, the narrator describes Imogene’s experience:

Everyone sang ‘Silent Night,’ including the audience. We sang all the verses too, and when we got to ‘Son of God, Love’s pure light,’ I happened to look at Imogene and I almost dropped my hymn book on a baby angel. Everyone had been waiting all this time for the Herdmans to do something absolutely unexpected. And sure enough, that was what happened. Imogene Herdman was crying. In the candlelight her face was all shiny with tears and she didn’t even bother to wipe them away. She just sat there—awful old Imogene—in her crookedy veil, crying and crying and crying (77).

She experiences something that moves her to tears, and rather than sadness, the narrator thinks it looks like Imogene has discovered God. Imogene’s effect on the pageant will hopefully make her participate each year and provide more chances for her to feel something positive with the community.