Single Parenthood & I: The Christmas Show
No matter how pushed your schedule might be, the annual Christmas show is an essential date in the calendar of any self-respecting parent.
Of all the annual traditions of the school year, the Christmas show seems to be the one that inspires the most enthusiasm from the parents. Faces you've never seen around the school before will find a way of creeping out of work for an hour to grab the opportunity of seeing their offspring onstage, tunelessly hammering out songs which, you've guessed it, none of us have ever, ever heard before.
Mine are in Years Two and Four respectively. Older kid will be in a church up the road belting out carols tomorrow. I'll have to make a late decision over whether I have yet another spare hour or so to trek up there to hear it for myself. Ultimately, the blocks of time that I have are precious, and sometimes I have to make sacrifices.
This year, Younger has been the one banging on about his Christmas show for the previous couple of weeks. He's a shepherd this year—a marked improvement on last year, when he was allocated the role of 'Donkey' and proudly walked out of his classroom wearing a big sticker with precisely that written across it in marker pen; that sticker adorned his stable bedroom door for months afterwards—and the good news there is that this year's didn't require much effort, costume-wise. A dark top, some dark leggings and a tea towel, and we were good.
The first challenge relating to these shows is establishing when, exactly, they're taking place, a situation not helped by our own specific circumstances. My two are at different school sites. Until last summer these were two separate schools, but they've merged now under one name. It used to be that when I got a text message from them, usually pertaining running across the playground, falling flat on his face, and getting a nosebleed (usually Younger) or getting their head stuck in a letterbox or something (usually Older), I could at least identify which child it related to immediately from which school had sent it. Now they all come through from the same school name, which necessitates an extra layer of diligence on my part, when reading them.
At a time of year like this, with texts and emails flying around like digital confetti, this all can become extremely confusing to the point of overwhelming, all the more so when a quick search of my messages revealed that they'd sent out no reminders specifically related to this show whatsoever. I eventually found the dates and times at the bottom of a weekly update sent out about three weeks ago. If you're ever wondering why parents can look so haggard at times, my answer is that it can feel like it's the schools as much as anything else. God bless them, they do an incredible job, but dear lord they can be exhausting, at times.
The excitement in the hall was palpable as the lights went down and we got our mandatory warning not to take any photographs or film any videos. A copy of their dress rehearsal performance can, of course, be purchased for a modest fee from the school office. But when they came out, I got perhaps my biggest surprise of the afternoon. Christ on a bike, there's so many of them! They just kept coming out, from a door in the corner, a good sixty of them on and around the stage, all jostling for position and waving in the general direction of anyone who they think may be mum and/or dad.
Of course, there are also certain conventions to these performances. Most noticeable are the lengthy pauses between songs and scenes, which leave you with the mildly uncomfortable feeling that every single person involved with this production has suffered simultaneous, group amnesia. Three seconds turn into five, which turn into ten... And then either another song starts blaring away or a tiny voice that you can't match to any of the faces you can see starts wittering on about a cold midwinter's night in Bethlehem.
The theme of this year's show was something about a star that wouldn't come out to shine. The boy playing the star was living his best life, with golden rays attached around his waist, belting out every song with the urgency of someone who'd been told that his cat might get put down if the director wasn't nominated for an Olivier Award. Actually, I'm being more than a little unfair, there. He was having the time of his life. Definitely no catsassination required.
The other convention of these shows is that even though they are essentially nativity stories, there is an obvious and evident desire on the part of the—adult, let's not forget—writers of the songs to come at them from different angles. It doesn't make any appreciable difference at all, of course. The songs are more or less incomprehensible, because they're being sung by six and seven year old kids who are emphatically not child prodigies.
They can't sing on time or in tune, but what they lack in those two characteristics they more than make up for with ear drum-shredding enthusiasm. It's just that—and this is all the more accentuated for me now that tinnitus is increasingly rendering my ears as being 'for decorative and holding glasses in place purposes only'—I can barely work out what they're singing about. The Mary, the Joseph and the preponderance of donkeys on stage is the real giveaway as to what we're witnessing, here. There's a little percussion orchestra also going on, but Billy Cobham isn't going to have to surrender his throne to this lot any time soon.
The music itself falls into the extremely niche combination of being Rod, Jane and Freddy-lite crossed with Oasis. The former of these is no bad thing, since RJF, as I now call them, are musical geniuses. The music is upbeat. It's nice. It is (ironically enough, since we really are in deep midwinter and it'll be getting dark in an hour), the sound of sunshine. If you're old enough, you already *know* what it sounds like; it's an aural Proustian rush. As for the lyrics, well, since the only word I can really make out is "Shiiiiiiine" (and we do hear this word repeatedly), I'm led to the ultimate conclusion that they were written by Noel Gallagher. The bits that I managed to pick out certainly sounded childlike enough.
Of course, what really matters is that they're having a brilliant time. When Younger's group appear at the front of the stage for their song, he's on a completely different side of it to everyone else and I can't 100% for certain say that he's supposed to be where he’s standing. For about the first thirty seconds of the song, he looks terrified, just standing staring into the middle distance. But then he clocks me, gives a little wave, and quickly catches up with everybody else. Do I shed a tiny tear at this absolutely beautiful kid belting out his song and getting every single one of his hand gestures right? I couldn't possibly comment.
One of the big advantages of these shows is that they're blessedly short. Such are the concentration spans of the cast that any more than fifteen to twenty minutes would almost certainly result in the entire production rapidly descending into chaos. A handful of songs, some gold, frankincense and myrrh, and we're done. I was a little disappointed that they didn't end on the traditional We Wish You A Merry Christmas, with the word 'wish' being pronounced like the sound of a half-second blast from a Dyson blade dryer, but we can't have everything.
At the end, Younger is delighted. When I pick him up from class half an hour after the end of the show, he can’t talk about anything else, though the jury’s out over whether he might continue to pursue the stage as an option for the future or not. I'm not entirely sure whether I can consider him a natural born performer or not, but do I know with certainty that I can call him naturally enthusiastic, and that's more than enough for now. Perhaps I will go up that church tomorrow afternoon, after all.