What a wonderful pleasure it is to extend a joyous Christmas to all of you as together we celebrate the birth of Christ, Our Savior! Hopefully, you are not too tired or worn out from your Christmas preparations, skiing, snowboarding or anything else that you have done to get ready for Christmas.
A successful businessman went to a florist shop to have a poinsettia delivered to his mother for Christmas Day. He knew he should drive across town and bring it to her, but as usual, he was way too busy.
While at the shop, a twelve year-old boy came in, also to buy a poinsettia for his mother, but he didn’t have enough money for the fancy one he picked out. The businessman was impressed with the young boy’s sincerity and said he’d cover the remaining cost.
The little boy spontaneously hugged the man and thanked him. He took the poinsettia and hurried out the door. The man watched the boy as he carefully crossed the street and went to the cemetery. The clerk told the man that the little boy had been buying a poinsettia every Christmas for years and taking it to the cemetery.
The man was inquisitive so he followed the boy and watched as the boy carefully and gently placed the beautiful poinsettia on top of a flat gravestone. Then he saw the boy kneel at a gravesite. This made the businessman very curious, so he went to where the boy was kneeling in prayer and asked him what he was doing.
“My Ma has been dead since I was 5, and I always bring her a poinsettia on Christmas,” he said. “She loved Christmas and the legend about the poinsettia.”
The businessman had not heard about a legend surrounding the poinsettia, so he asked, “What is the legend?”
“My mother told me that a long time ago, a small boy in Mexico with no gift to set before the nativity scene, knelt to pray in the snow outside his village church. As he prayed, a beautiful plant with star-like leaves turned red before his eyes. He dug up the plant and it was the little boy’s loving gift that he presented to the Christ Child. This is my loving gift to my mother.”
The man stayed with the boy for a while as the boy prayed and thought about his own mother. He then returned to the flower shop and asked the florist, “Did you deliver the poinsettia yet?”
“No,” the florist replied.
“Good. I’ll take it with me and bring this Christmas present to my mother myself.”
Your presence at this Mass is a gift you bring to the Christ Child this Christmas. Don’t we have to bring ourselves to Christ? Isn’t that the best gift we can give to Jesus?
There are people who do not believe in the Incarnation, that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and that our Divine God actually took on our human condition. There are some who have never even heard of the first Christmas.
Barbara Robinson writes about this in her book entitled, “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” which tells the story of the Herdman family.
These kids were absolutely the worst kids in the whole wide world.
They lied, stole, beat up on other kids, cursed their teachers, and even set fires to buildings just to watch them burn. There were four boys and two girls, and they were all skinny, with dirty stringy hair and each of them were bullies and mean. No one liked them. Ralph was the oldest, followed by Imogene, Leroy, Allen, Ollie and the youngest, Gladys.
All the neighbors wished they would move away and none of the teachers wanted them in their class. The teachers would just pass them to the next class to get rid of them.
They didn’t have any friends, just each other. And they even fought with each other.
The Herdman family was a single-parent family and the mother held down two jobs. This meant that the kids pretty much looked after each other and that was the reason they were always in trouble. They would steal food to survive. In fact, that is how they got involved in the Christmas pageant. They heard that the church gave away food to the children who were in the Christmas play. So, they went to church to volunteer to be in the Christmas pageant even though they didn’t know the first thing about the Christmas story.
When all the other kids saw the Herdman’s in church, they got nervous, but not the teacher. The Herdman’s didn’t know that it was the smart, neat and well-behaved kids who were always asked to be Joseph and Mary.
But this year was going to be different. None of the regulars wanted to volunteer because the Herdman kids were going to be in the pageant.
Then the people in the village got really upset with the teacher in charge when they heard that Ralph would be Joseph and Imogene would be Mary. Leroy, Allen and Ollie would be the Three Wise Men and Gladys, the angel.
Rehearsals began, and the Herdman’s were always late, but they eventually arrived because of the food. The Herdman kids didn’t know anything about the Christmas story. They never went to church. When they did go to school, Christmas was all about snow days and Santa Claus.
So, the teacher read the story of the Incarnation and the birth of Jesus Christ from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The other kids who knew the story got bored and started talking, but the Herdman kids told them to “shut up.” This was one of the first times that the Herdman children ever sat still and paid attention.
They were full of questions. “What is an inn?” “What is a census?” “What is a stable?” “What is a manger?”
“What does it mean to be ‘with child’”? Ralph knew the answer to that and yelled, “Pregnant.”
When they got to the part of the innkeeper who had no room, the Herdman boys wanted to beat the kid up who played the innkeeper and said they would burn his motel down.
When they heard that the baby Jesus was born in a barn without a bed, well they knew about that. None of them ever had beds. As newborns, they were just put in the bottom drawer of a dresser.
Imogene said that if Child Protective Services could see that Jesus was laid in a box from which the animals ate, the social workers would have taken Jesus away from Mary and Joseph.
They didn’t like the fat kid who played King Herod and they wanted to do the same thing to him that King Herod did to those other newborn babies and boys under two years old.
During rehearsals, Ralph fought with his sister Imogene, who played Mary, because she wouldn’t let anybody get near the baby, Jesus. Imogene insisted that she use her only doll as the baby, because she loved her doll so much.
Finally, the night of the pageant came.
The Herdman kids didn’t want to wear the costumes, so they wore their own clothes. They looked like refugees from a strange land.
When they walked on stage, it occurred to everybody that this is probably what the Holy Family looked like anyway. They wouldn’t be neat and clean from the long, hard journey. Imogene even held her baby doll as if she was scared to death. Ralph would not let anyone harm his sister that night, as he knew his sister was the perfect person to be Mary.
Then the Three Kings, Leroy, Allen and Ollie, came on stage, each carrying a gift. But they didn’t have gold, frankincense or myrrh. They brought something the baby could use: diapers, baby food and blankets.
And then something happened that never happened before in a Christmas pageant.
Imogene began to cry and kiss her doll while Joseph hugged Mary. The curtain closed with the sounds of Silent Night, and everyone agreed it was the Best Christmas Pageant Ever.
My Christmas prayer is that you and your family have the Best Christmas Ever.
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