Capturing the Days: The Christmas Play

Everyone else in blog land is talking about their new year's goals and resolutions but since I'm a slacker and haven't written much here since before Christmas, I'm going to back up a little bit and write about Christmas. Maybe I'll get to writing down some of my goals for 2012 on another post.

One of my favorite parts about Christmas and what I was most excited about was the Christmas play in which Jack and Casey sang. Practice started for this play during the last few weeks of summer vacation. It was called drama camp and a couple mornings a week, I dropped the kids off at church for 2 hours. I didn't realize at first that I could just drop them off so it was an unexpected, very pleasant surprise when I realized I had a couple hours to myself. I think I spent them all at Walmart though, preparing for the hurricane.

Starting in November there were practices between the masses on Sunday mornings and practices on Wednesday nights and then some big ones on a couple of Saturday mornings. At first I didn't understand the play. It wasn't the traditional Christmas story that I expected. It was about a group of kids practicing for their Christmas play and they were a little rebellious and didn't want to play the traditional roles of shepherds, sheep and snowflakes. (Although I didn't realize there were a lot of snowflakes in the Christmas story.) They all wanted to be Christmas presents. Eventually it gets sorted out and the true gift of Christmas is all the children and people.

As I watched all these practices and saw the play coming together, I really started to like it. It was a very cute play and all the kids worked so hard. Even when Jack and Casey were sick for the beginning of December, they still practiced singing their song. By the end of all these practices, they knew all of the parts of the play. They can sing (and still do even weeks after) all of the other parts. There were days when the songs were stuck in my head all day.

So, the play was at 3:30pm on Christmas Eve before the 4pm mass. My main goal was to get there early enough to get a good seat to see the kids perform. Last year, we got to church at 3:15 for the 4pm mass and were seated in the lobby so I knew it had to be earlier than that. I talked to the music director and she suggested being there by 2:45 to get parking even though the kids didn't need to get there until 3 for practice. So we got there at 2:40...the parking lot was pretty empty and we got second row seats.

And then I endured wise-cracks, jokes, and sarcastic comments galore about how early we were at church, mostly from my husband. I expected it, especially after we were early for a light show the previous weekend, and I didn't care because I just wanted a good seat to see my kids sing their hearts out in the Christmas show!

The play was really great and the kids were so good and I was so proud of them. Jack sang and did all his choreography and didn't even look too afraid. And Casey was a ham every time she saw us watching her or taking pictures. Hearing the whole church full of people clapping for them was really nice. They all got a great round of applause for delivering a beautiful Christmas play.