Page 46 - 2018 AdventDevo-Flip book

Christmas Eve
The Greatest Gift of All
“But Mary treasured up all these things
and pondered them in her heart.”

Scripture: Micah 5: 2-4, Luke 2:19
I come from a large, but very close-knit family. My family always made it
a priority to spend holidays and birthdays and other important occasions
together. This meant that I grew up with my cousins and I even graduat-
ed with a few of them. As I look back on my childhood, I am blessed by
the numerous memories I have of my siblings and my cousins together.
One of my favorite memories is of all the times we spent Christmas Eve
together at our grandparents’ house.

My oldest cousin, Stephanie, started a long-standing tradition when we
were all quite young: our group of cousins, totaling ten kids, voluntarily
reenacted the Christmas story for our parents on Christmas Eve. For the
first year, our reenactment was more of a chaotic pantomime than a play.
My two youngest cousins, LeAnne and Jared, were about three at the
time and being the youngest, they were cast as the animals. One was a
sheep and the other was a donkey. You could tell which was which, not
by their costumes, but because neither of them knew what sounds the
animals made, they just crawled around and yelled: “Sheep! Sheep!” and
“Donkey! Donkey!” respectively. I know there is video evidence of this
first Christmas pageant somewhere; however, because both LeAnne and
Jared are now adults, I’m sure they have hidden it away in some dark,
dusty corner of my aunt and uncle’s basement.

As the years went on, our Christmas Eve reenactment got more involved
and more elaborate and even included accurate animal sounds. Stepha-
nie wrote scripts, assigned roles, directed, and only once narrated as the
donkey. Speaking roles were in high demand and I remember that my
first speaking role was as the main angel. This was a special role not be-
cause of my lines, but because of my costume; I wore an old costume
wedding dress from my grandma’s treasure trove of dress-up clothes
stashed in the attic. In fact, upon arriving at my grandparents’ house, all
of us cousins would dart up to the attic to prepare, practice, and get into