Miss De Weese had me playing Mary the mother of Jesus in the school Christmas pageant. She told me I didn’t have to do much more than hold the baby doll Jesus in my arms and keep a peaceful look on my face as the shepherds came to see the sweet Christ child.
“I’ve never held a baby before,” I told her, hoping that would lose me the part. “I don’t know how to. I’d probably drop it.”
“Didn’t you ever play with dolls?” Miss De Weese asked.
I guessed she didn’t know all that much about me yet.
“Why don’t you get Hazel Wheeler to do it?” I asked.
Miss De Weese said that Hazel had played Mary the year before, it said so in the program somebody’d saved in a file. And Ethel the year before that. She told me that it was time for somebody else to take a turn.
I just did not know why it had to be me.
From what I remembered, Mary of the Bible was about as perfect as any girl could be. I didn’t imagine she’d ever sassed her folks or took something that didn’t belong to her. She was God’s pick for Jesus’s mother due to the fact that she was so good.
As for me, I was anything but good. It would take either a miracle or mighty good acting for me to play that part.
On the day of the pageant I knelt at the manger, the swaddled baby doll Jesus in my arms. Like Miss De Weese had told me, I didn’t look at all the folks sitting in the pews watching me. Instead, I kept my eyes on the face of the fair-skinned, blue-eyed newborn Lord.
The cattle lowed and the sheep bleated. The shepherds shook with fright.
Angels gloried and wise men gave gifts. Joseph stood off to the side like he might just get sick.
I kept all those things and pondered them in my heart.
When I’d been smaller I’d thought Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus had stayed there, taking up housekeeping right in that Bethlehem stable. From the watercolor picture of the first Christmas in my Bible, it hadn’t looked any worse than some of the cabins the sharecroppers stayed in back in Red River. Maybe even a good deal better.
I’d learned since then that it wasn’t so.
But for that night, that short time, it had sheltered that holy family. I wondered if God hadn’t seen fit to clear away the animal smells and plug up the drafty gaps in the stable walls. If He’d let a little of the angel’s glory song stick around until it turned to a lullaby for His sweet baby Son.
And I hoped that, in His greatness, He’d looked at all He’d done on that night in that humble and dim stable and saw that it was good.
Daddy kept the fire going all day on Christmas. Aunt Carrie made sure we stayed full up with cookies and ham and potatoes and such. Ray beat me no less than five times at chess on the set he’d gotten under the tree that morning.
All those funny-shaped pieces did nothing but confound me.
Uncle Gus told us stories of Christmases past. He sure did have a lot of them to share on account he’d seen so many in his life. At least that was what he told us.
I took to sitting on the davenport, my brand new book of fairy tales open on my lap. It wasn’t the same as the one I’d had before. The pictures were different, darker. But the stories were more or less the same.
I read them slow, those stories, letting them sink back into that familiar part of my soul that knew them each by heart. Princesses turned to slaves and fairy godmothers saving the day. Three little pigs and bears and blind mice. A girl in red gone to call on her grandmother.
Fairy tales with happily-ever-after endings that I needed right about then.
Right smack-dab in the middle of that storybook was the one of the boy and girl, them being taken from the home where they’d not been wanted, not been loved. They’d found danger and struggle and darkness along the journey. But they’d found their way to a new family and a new life.
They’d gotten home.
And not a trail of crumbs could have led them away.