La Feira’s Christmas

It was a tradition at my maternal grandmother’s house for children to present a play to adults before Christmas Eve dinner. And it was for many years my grandmother who organized everything: she chose the text, took care of the costumes and rehearsed us in what was both the first rehearsal and the general rehearsal.

Every year I dreamed of being Our Lady, I don’t even know why. Maybe because all the plays culminated with the nativity scene and so I stayed on stage longer, or maybe because Our Lady held the baby Jesus (the most recent baby) and that pleased me, I don’t know. The truth is that the role was mine for some time because my grandmother thought it was beautiful to have a blonde Our Lady with blue eyes, a somewhat Aryan view of the thing, and since the mother of Jesus really existed, those would certainly not be her colors.

When my grandmother got fed up, maybe when she lost count of her grandchildren, the role of director passed to my mother and then to my older cousin. And as authoritarian as my cousin was (which was a lot) she could do nothing with a group of cousins who could fill a bus. The more she screamed, the more we laughed. It was anarchy, a very happy anarchy.

Because I have such good memories of these pieces, I decided to take advantage of the eighteen children that my husband’s family has and do the same.

I wrote the text in November, shared it with my nephews, made a song and started to take care of the costumes with my children. As I have sent a large amount of books in the last few months, I had a lot of cardboard boxes and used them for almost everything. Please don’t think it was a big deal, I don’t have any skill for manual work.

The day of the premiere arrived and just like at my grandmother’s house, there was only one rehearsal.
It all started well, the three narrators were very straight in their seats, narrator 1 held the microphone and my eldest daughter pretended to sleep on the floor. I opened the glass doors to simulate the curtains and we started the play: “Santa Claus disappeared”. The leprechaun entered, said what he had to say with great professionalism and left. My daughter forgot that she was acting and watched the narrators while I signaled her to leave too. Nothing. I went in to take her off, took off her pajamas over her clothes and pushed her in again with a card computer. Then it was time for the microphones to enter (by microphones we mean two 4-year-old children with aluminum foil helmets dancing the “Video killed the radio star”).

That’s when everything started to unravel: one of my nephews put the flag on his head ahead of time, the songs played again of his own volition, my eldest son came in as Santa Claus while the youngest tried to pluck his beard, the narrators dropped their papers to watch the chaos, another nephew didn’t want to come in and the microphone speaker turned off. We turned it back on, but now the voices came out full of echo, like in bumper cars. At that moment I assumed I was part of the cast, dancing, wearing costumes on stage, shouting “Narrator 3!” and saying the lines out loud when they forgot them. To my daughter, who enters the final scene without having put on her pajamas as she was supposed to, I just say “Cover yourself up to your neck with the blanket”. Santa Claus leaves the gift, reads an inspirational letter and I play “To all a good Christmas” loudly. We have reached the end. I’ve never done a triathlon race, but the feeling at the finish must be quite similar to that. Five minutes of bowing follow and I find myself thinking “It didn’t go that bad. Next year I’m going to be more ambitious.”