Christmas Eve

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

CHRISTMAS EVE

If you were like me when you were a kid, you were terrified of onstage appearances. Before my first Christmas Eve performance, I repeated my line 17 million times. I played those four words over and over until they left a permanent crease in my brain.

Had I been savvy to crib notes at age 5, I would’ve written my one line for the program on my hand — although I doubt that a pencil or crayon’s mark would have transferred well onto skin.

Every year at the Pawnee Rock Bergthal Mennonite Church, each Sunday school class presented a Christmas Eve skit or a song. And the congregation rounded out the evening with Christmas hymns.

My class was to recite a poem about the stars over Bethlehem and each of us had one line to deliver. Dressed in white choir robes, we each carried a star-on-a-stick, the cardboard stars cut from cereal boxes and covered with aluminum foil.

I didn’t want to flub my line. My parents were in the audience, my brother, my friends, grandparents and Grandma’s sisters, Ella and Clara. Well, I could go on and on — I was related to probably 80 percent of the congregation. Nearly everyone was my second, third or fourth cousin (possibly removed a time or two, or however it is that cousins are calculated.)

Our ancestors came over on the same boat. Literally. In 1874, after sailing to America on the steamship “City of London,” about 30 Mennonite families found their way to the Pawnee Rock-Dundee area.

Their passports had been delayed for months so they arrived in Kansas in November instead of early spring. Having no time to build shelter before the snow hit, the Santa Fe Railroad provided boxcars for housing that first winter.

Over the decades, the congregation built several churches. The brick building currently in use was constructed in 1915 about three miles north of Pawnee Rock. It’s on a rise, surrounded by pastures and farmland.

When we approached at night, the church’s yard lights were the first line of greeters. Inside, two members of the congregation shook our hands in welcome. On a winter’s evening, stepping inside the church felt like a warm embrace and the background murmur of voices was low and comforting.

The sanctuary was always packed for the Christmas Eve program. Kids came home from college. Families returned from Chicago or Dallas or from wherever their jobs had flung them.

And on that evening when I was 5, my classmates and I walked onto the stage. Our teacher lowered the microphone and nodded at me. I stepped up, the star-on-a-stick clutched in my sweaty grip and I recited my line without flaw: “I am a star.”

In the years since I moved away from home, I’ve returned maybe a half-dozen times for the Christmas Eve program. As an adult, you watch the children perform and you find yourself leaning in, willing them to do well, so that they’ll feel proud of themselves.

It’s been quite a few years since I attended the church’s Christmas Eve program, but a sideline scene from one particular night has stayed with me.

A woman named Shelly, who was several years behind me in school, sat in the front row holding her infant. With some of the pews set at a perpendicular angle, I had a good view of the two of them. The baby was in Shelly’s lap, facing her, and in the middle of the evening’s program, the child spit up on her. (OK, it was actually projectile vomiting.)

I watched Shelly as she found a fresh cloth and cleaned first her infant and then her own black dress, and she did this without drawing attention, without a wrinkle to her nose, without a single look of disgust. I was mesmerized by Shelly’s serenity, her calm countenance, the tenderness in her touch.

“O Holy Night” and “Joy to the World” were among the hymns sung that evening, but the song I carried home with me was “Silent Night.” One moment of a mother’s unconditional love made real the scene of “’round yon virgin, mother and child.” And what I observed was nothing less than “love’s pure light.”

Copyright 2010 ~ Cheryl Unruh