Christmas Concert

I am standing on the stage, holding my cardboard letter turned into me. My letter is M. I turn my letter to the audience and speak. My voice is loud, clear, and stilted. M is for magical- Santa coming down the chimney. Relief, I’ve said it all and now can look down the line as each classmate in turn flips over a cardboard letter, -E R R-, down the line, some yelling out their piece- C is for Christ, the reason for the season- or whispering- H is for holy, Oh holy night- some shocked into silence until loudly prompted behind the curtain- T is for turkey, roasted and stuffed, some giggle, some shuffle, some look down at their feet, until the final card is flipped, a large exclamation mark to signal everyone to shout, “Merry Christmas” and to allow little Evalina to take part.  Evalina who is in grade two and who would be in grade two when I graduated from grade eight in that one room school, Evalina still in the same desk, still the same size, with her face like a rubber doll and her hair ever wispy and white like an old woman’s.

We are grade 2’s and 3’s at S.S.11 Public School and we are the closing act of the annual Christmas concert held in the basement of the United Church (established 1873) and this is the culmination of our weeks of preparation. It starts on the Friday afternoon after Hallowe’en when we begin the walk to the church, a stone’s throw away from the school and a blessed relief from the dreaded reading to an older student, possibly a boy, maybe dour Jacob Liemann, the oral math genius, reading that marked long afternoons.

The concert is of course more ambitious than the presentation of my junior classmates. The serious Irene Black who is not allowed to play baseball for fear of injuring her fingers plays a classical piano piece. Three Grade 8 girls sing their song with harmony, the one prepared for the Rotary Music Festival. Shirley Gough plays her accordion. Two of the big boys give a comic recitation. As we prepared, there was an unstated message from our formidable teacher that somehow our work here will be evaluated, hence no writing of our short recitation on the back of our cardboard letters. I am in awe of the bigger kids, those who have a role in the two marquee presentations of the evening- Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the always required retelling of the Christmas story. I am unaware that our twenty-minute version of the Dicken’s classic is greatly abridged but am impressed because I have a part in the play. I am one of the Cratchit children though admittedly I have no real lines. Instead, as we play on the floor, we have been instructed by Mrs. McKenzie to say “rhubarb” over and over again which will make it seem as if we are having conversations. We have learned that this is what professional actors do in crowd scenes so feel disproportionately important. But my real awe is reserved for the grade eight boy who plays Scrooge who has many lines and never stumbles.

The retelling of the Christmas story is required every year and never varies much. The central figures, Mary, Joseph, and the Christ child doll take centre stage. Mary has nothing to say but has mastered her look of wide-eyed adoration as she leans over the manger and beholds the Christ doll. I am dimly aware that the girl chosen to be Mary is the prettiest of the senior girls, a slim girl with long wavy blonde hair and no trace of pubescent imperfection in her creamy skin. She seems as serene and elevated as a fairytale princess awaiting a troop of suitors. Joseph is the dark-haired captain of his bantam hockey team and already marked as cool. The angels come and go, the shepherds guard their stuffed toy sheep, the Wise Men trek across the stage to deliver their three gifts and few words to the holy couple, and circling this tableau, the massed choir of the rest of the school sing carols artfully chosen by Mrs. McKenzie to link the story together. There is huge applause at the end of the presentation.

I look out from my place at the side of the stage near the front where the smaller students sit to sing. I can see my mother and my father. They are sitting in a row with Evalina’s parents and grandparents, the only people in that row. My father is right next to the grandfather, the scary Mr. McVicar with the sunken face and the jaw that looks all eaten away. “Cancer,” my mother has said and it is rude to stare at him. Evalina’s parents are there, her mother looking almost as old as my grandmother, her father looking as if he has just come in from the barn, still wearing a denim smock coat. I have asked my mother why they look so different from everyone else. “They are poor,” my mother said, “but Evalina has such a pretty name.” My mother is most impressed with names and has saddled me with a name I greatly dislike at this time. I am Briony and I will not hear that name given to any other girl until I am an adult of some years.

The basement is overflowing. Every pupil’s parents and many grandparents are there along with younger siblings. There may be over one hundred people. So many that some are standing at the back. These are mainly youths as old as seventeen or eighteen, all young men, all tall and gangly, looking uncomfortable in starched shirts and dress jackets, hair freshly combed and brylcreamed, young men who have just finished the evening’s milking. They are both awkward and intimidating standing there, sometimes laughing together for a moment between acts of the concert. They are intimidating but not so much as they will be in a few years when I am on the cusp of being a teenager and am a large girl in a pink taffeta dress, tragically the same dress as a grade eight girl who has recently lost many pounds of weight from a magic pill her doctor gave her, and we must make our exit from the stage, down the aisle, and past that clutch of perennially looming youths.

But this night is one of great happiness. I have remembered my lines. I have been a Cratchit child. Santa has come at the end of the program. And I do know already that he is just pretend, that the thin man with the skimpy beard is Mr. Hipley the Sunday school teacher and that the present he handed to me is the scarf I saw my mother accidentally leave in a bag on the table. I do not yet know how much I will later think about my mother and my father sitting with Evalina’s parents nor how the mysteries of early memory shape us and visit us especially at Christmas.