The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson

Author:Barbara Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter 5

When we got home my father wanted to hear all about it.

“Well,” Mother said, “just suppose you had never heard the Christmas story, and didn’t know anything about it, and then somebody told it to you. What would you think?”

My father looked at her for a minute or two and then he said, “Well, I guess I would think it was pretty disgraceful that they couldn’t find any room for a pregnant woman except in the stable.”

I was amazed. It didn’t seem natural for my father to be on the same side as the Herdmans. But then, it didn’t seem natural for the Herdmans to be on the right side of a thing. It would have made more sense for them to be on Herod’s side.

“Exactly,” Mother said. “It was perfectly disgraceful. And I never thought about it much. You hear all about the nice warm stable with all the animals breathing, and the sweet-smelling hay—but that doesn’t change the fact that they put Mary in a barn. Now, let me tell you . . .” She told my father all about the rehearsal and when she was through she said, “It’s clear to me that, deep down, those children have some good instincts after all.”

My father said he couldn’t exactly agree. “According to you,” he said, “their chief instinct was to burn Herod alive.”

“No, their chief instinct was to get Mary and the baby out of the barn. But even so, it was Herod they wanted to do away with, and not Mary or Joseph. They picked out the right villain—that must mean something.”

“Maybe so.” My father looked up from his newspaper. “Is that what finally happened to Herod? What did happen to Herod, anyway?”

None of us knew. I had never thought much about Herod. He was just a name, some-body in the Bible, Herodtheking.

But the Herdmans went and looked him up.

The very next day Imogene grabbed me at recess. “How do you get a book out of the library?” she said.

“You have to have a card.”

“How do you get a card?”

“You have to sign your name.”

She looked at me for a minute, with her eyes all squinched up. “Do you have to sign your own name?”

I thought Imogene probably wanted to get one of the dirty books out of the basement, which is where they keep them, but I knew nobody would let her do that. There is this big chain across the stairs to the basement and Miss Graebner, the librarian, can hear it rattle no matter where she is in the library, so you don’t stand a chance of getting down there.

“Sure you have to sign your own name,” I said. “They have to know who has the books.” I didn’t see what difference it made—whether she signed the card with her own name, or signed the card Queen Elizabeth—Miss Graebner still wasn’t going to let Imogene Herdman take any books out of the public library.

I guess she couldn’t stop them from using the library, though, because that was where they found out about Herod.

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