Faith Works 12-10-05
Jeff Gill

Records On Display

There is an archive in most local churches; a time capsule of sorts opened once a year.
Not a history file in a cabinet drawer, or a shelf in the library. It is a closet, a particular one, with a rack and shelf set aside for this season.
These are the Christmas costumes, the outfits that endure from year to year. Some new clothes join the ranks each pageant, and every tableau set beside the cantata results in another pair of angel wings made or glitter halo set fresh on young heads.
But many churches carry a stock from year to year and decade to decade of the core characters, sometimes, depending on closet space and size of the congregation, with three sizes per role. Mary has her blue robes, Joseph usually a brown cloak with tan tunic, and a baby Jesus in reserve on the highest shelf in case no infant has been born since July in the church family to lie in the manger.
Three crowns, if not more, stack alongside a small chest, a pottery jar, and a tattered but still wrapped box. Old retired bathrobes of an assortment of stripes and solid designs hang below. Burlap jerkins usually dangle in quantity for shepherds, and a dark corner nestles a sheaf of staves (soon to be lightsabers during rehearsals).
White robes, sometimes terrycloth or, if there are skilled seamstresses enough, tailored robes cut in varying lengths, hang more neatly, with a plastic bag covering the massed bundle of wings, silver tinsel glued along the edges. If the tailors are truly talented, there are also a few more elaborate costumes: ox and donkey, sheepskin coats and eared hoods aplenty, even the stray goat or camel sometimes. Or there may just be a stack of cardboard or plywood cutouts leaning against the back wall behind the clothes, hinged props swung flush for storage but always ready for action with a slight freshening of the paint.
What makes this assemblage a very special archive in so many places is the massing of small details, and the knowledge of where they come from. This robe was Mr. Tilly’s, given by his wife after he died. The brocade trim on these shawls was out of Mrs. Shellhammer’s scrap bag, her now long deceased but still remembered.
The sheep costumes were made by Mrs. Franklin when she was still Miss Williams, and her grandchildren will wear them in a few years. The shepherd’s staves came off ol’ Miz Varia’s farm, cut by the men’s group when they were clearing brush and raking leaves for her before she passed.
See the wings? Not the newer ones made from foamcore, but the wings now in the back row made from corrugated and painted white (it rubs off, but the robes are white, too, they’re still perfectly good); my aunt made those back when Mr. Jones directed the youth choir.
Over in the west pews, Mr. Boles remembers when his son carried that wooden chest as Melchior. Will he and his family make it back in time for Christmas dinner tomorrow? In the choir Ezziebeth squints to see if her sequins are still even along the edge of Mary’s shawl, and thinks it would be a good idea to re-hem that after Christmas this year.
When the star creaks up into the Bethlehem sky, hanging from a pulley hidden behind the choir loft pillar, two men remember how much work it took to get that thing anchored twenty years ago, three boys now men recall when they got picked to pull the rope at the director’s cue from the front pew, and four women each think they were the ones to make that particular pattern of gold paint and glitter. Only one did the finish that the congregation sees that night, but they are all correct, in a way.
And the one who carefully cut the fourteen-pointed star out of a piece of premium plywood, getting the design from a book on the Church of the Nativity and its centuries old star set in the floor of the ancient grotto, and whispered a prayer under the bandsaw’s whine with each of the twentyeight cuts it took to make it: he’s been gone nearly a quarter century, and no one in the church tonight remembers his name.
Yet his star is still here, drawing all eyes up as it rises, until it descends to a safe place in the Christmas closet for next year.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your pageant at disciple@voyager.net.