Children's Christmas Plays - The Beginning

Each year, I work with the kids and youth to put together a Kids' Christmas Play. Since 2010, we’ve done ten plays, with the eleventh play set for during the service on December 11th. Since few people have been involved behind the scenes for the plays, I thought I would give an overview of the last ten productions, as well as a few glimpses at scripts previously only seen by the actors.

The original idea back in 2010 was to do a ‘Christmas Pageant’ in a different way by retelling the Christmas story in a new setting. This basic idea, of telling the same story in a new context, is still the basis for the plays each year. How that is done has evolved over the years, though.

The first play was “A Christmas Play in a Mall”, with shoppers, teenagers, guards, and maintenance workers getting pulled in as characters in an attempt to remind a harried parent the true meaning of Christmas. It was very much a musical, with several classic Christmas hymns included. It even had a theme song I had composed, “The Reason of Christmas.”

Both the kids and the congregation enjoyed the play, so the next year we performed two different plays. The first was during an Advent Sunday service, and was called “A Christmas Lesson.” The concept was the Christmas story set in a school. It included Herod as the Principal, Mary & Joseph as teachers, and students as angels and shepherds. There were still songs, but only prewritten ones.

The second play for 2011 was “The Christmas Story,” performed during the afternoon Christmas Eve service. The actors included kids, youth, and adults. This play told the story of a family during a power outage on Christmas Eve, where the grandfather tells everyone the story of Christmas, while pantomime actors play out the scenes in front.

It was a bit more serious, with fewer jokes and only “Silent Night” for music. The seriousness would not stay, but the number of songs would eventually shrink to keep rehearsals easier. Next week, I’ll cover the development of the plays into being more comedy focused, but if you’d like to read “The Christmas Story,” a link to the full script can be found below.