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Friends United Meeting |
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Sandy Spring Christmas Pageant Over 50 Years Old
The Sandy Spring Meeting Christmas pageant began in the early 1950s. Under the guidance of the Religious Education Committee, committee clerk Bertha Jacot, and Mary Adele Diamond, who organized music for the First Day School assembly programs, developed the pageant. Each of the women had children in First Day School. Mary Adele felt the key to the pageant was following the nativity story using Christmas carols and scripture.
Christmas Pageant at Sandy Spring
No Christmas pageant
in the Sandy Spring Friends’ Meeting House can begin
until the plastic is stretched across the floor
before the sheep arrive
wrapped in child shepherd’s arms
with the baby Jesus
in the embrace of a girl Mary,
as a boy Joseph sheepishly smiles.
The band is playing Christmas music,
the chorus of children with stick signs
radiating beckoning, dancing starlight
and cutouts of cows, donkeys and sheep|
gather animatedly on the benches
punctuating this historic tableau
with their beastly signs
going up and down,
as the song introduces each animal
into the pageant of new life with baby Christ.
The live sheep “baa” and bleat.
There is cooing from adults in the packed Meeting House —
parent doves crooning their Christmas joy,
as their children recreate the Coming of the Light.
These Sandy Spring Christmas pageants
prompt memories, too, of Christmas pasts,
when mature male Quakers in dark suits and crimson ties
recall when they were the baby Jesus, and they were
the Center of Hope’s Creation. And, mothers remember
when baby Jesus came from their womb.
Since Quakers internalize
their Spiritual quests,
the light of baby Jesus
lives on and on
in the pageant of unfolding life.
By Mike Clark
The first pageant was held as an assembly. A few years later, it was moved and was held in the meetinghouse. Another member of the Religious Education Committee, Betty Grey, raised sheep. She carefully bred a few sheep in the fall so they would be the best size for the children to handle in December. She continued this practice for almost 30 years.
Today the pageant continues to take place before a full meetinghouse. We see some children participating who have a parent who also took part in the pageant. The pageant involves children from pre-kindergarten through middle school. A young baby from a meeting family and the sheep add continuing reminders of the roots of the pageant.
Submitted by Flossie Fullerton, Pageant Coordinator in consultation with Bertha Jacot.