Christmas Plays - Recent Years

I will return next week to 2018, so let’s move on to 2019. For the second time, the kids chose to create a play that wasn’t just the Christmas story. SpaceX and Boeing Starliner were in the news and the kids wanted to go to space. So was born a unique story, Santa’s Stranded in Space!

Set in a sci-fi future, three kids ‘borrow’ a spaceship to help Santa after hearing his distress call on the radio. They end up stopping his jealous brother Rupert and saving Christmas for the whole galaxy.

One of the most memorable moments of creating the play was right at the beginning, when we were brainstorming ideas. We’d come up with the idea of a sci-fi Santa needing to be rescued. One of the fifth graders raised their hands and said “Everyone knows that Santa isn’t real, right?”

To which I responded, “Of course Santa’s real.” There was some minor argument about me being naive or silly, as to be expected from kids of that age. But then I explained:

Santa may not be a big guy in a red suit who comes down a chimney, but those presents come from someone. Someone in their lives cared enough to figure out what they wanted, to buy it, wrap it, and in the end, give the credit to completely fictitious person just so that the kids would be happy.

I’ll always remember their reaction. There was stunned silence. They had been so caught up in the literal, they had forgotten that Santa is really just the spirit we all have that makes us want others to be happy.

Everything looked great, and then 2020 hit. Obviously there was no play in 2020, but by fall of 2021, there was an opportunity for a few kids, distanced, to record video for the play. And so I wrote A Christmas Roadtrip.

A few jokes I liked in this one. Mary references Hilbert's Grand Hotel, which is part of a mathematical thought experiment involving a hotel with infinite rooms. An unexpected joke was the fact the Shepherd 6 was played by a youth much older than the other shepherds. And my favorite is Joseph's line after being asked by the innkeeper if they have reservations.

This is the only one the plays that I have a recording that you can watch along with. If you’d like to see how a written script is translated into a performance, you can open the script using the link below and watch along with the video.