Family Christmas Eve Service

One of my favorite plays I have directed is The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. I always loved the scene where the actual church Christmas Pageant would occur. There would be a reading from a portion of scripture, the "Angel Choir" would sing an accompanying Christmas Carol and then the little children dressed as shepherds or animals would come into the picture surrounding Mary, Joseph and the baby. ​

The baby angels from "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" by Christian Life Preparatory School 2015. My daughter Sadie is far left.

Years ago, before we had our children, my husband told me about a dream he had of having his family participate in the nativity story while interacting with his grandmother's nativity. Each Christmas Eve, usually after a service at church, our family would huddle near the Christmas tree and read the Christmas story from Luke 2.

Each family member would hold a character from the nativity and as their character was mentioned, they would place it in the nativity. This was simple enough and very memorable for our young children.

This year our family had a special holiday in Galveston to be near to a very dear family member who was undergoing treatment at MD Anderson and wouldn't be able to have a family Christmas unless we came to her. This was the perfect opportunity to expand our normal (very short) Christmas Eve story and get the entire story put together in one place and get the whole extended family to participate. I compiled the Christmas scriptures including prophecies about Jesus and included the Christmas Carol based on those verses. 

My husband has experience leading worship in our local church so we also printed the chords for him to play the guitar while we sing. 
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Notes:

1. We had kids from age 12 all the way down to 3 months so this year we didn't use real candles. I bought some flickering window candles from Home Depot that are battery-operated and we used those instead. The lighting made a big difference in the feel of the story. 
2. We didn't have a full nativity. The whole Christmas story has a lot of different parts. I had to put together several mismatched nativity sets to get enough to include all of the characters and to have enough for each of the kids. One of the kids just wanted to be all the sheep so we let that child have four different sheep from different nativities. I pray that one day I can find a set that has all the characters! Maybe I should commission one! It would be hard to let go of the really old family nativity so I may just make this work for a really long time. Don't use your fancy set. All of our pieces were from plastic molds or were on blocks. I have a fisher-price- plastic set (I will pull it out of the attic later to check what the name is) that is perfect for kids to play with and made one similar to this that my kids LOVE to stack and set out. 
3. As a backup I also had the instrumental versions of the carols set to play the particular verse and chorus indicated in the script.  (You can do this easily in iTunes by right clicking the track and then clicking "Get Info" and then adjusting the start and end time of the song).  Singing the whole carol would make this a REALLY LONG service so I just picked the part of the song that would add to the moment.  If you have young kids I recommend keeping things short!

You can print any pictures of characters and cut and Modge Podge the pictures to wooden blocks. They are indestructible!

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One year my daughter rearranged all the nativities and added some Little People Disney princesses and an owl in a truck. I imagined this was like a pre-meeting for everyone: "Okay everybody, Christmas is almost here! And although we represent several different nativities (and an owl in a truck), we need to pull together to tell the story of Christmas. Jesus, you are doing perfectly. Everyone look at Jesus' commitment and imitate it. Let's do this!"

Family Christmas Eve Service Script

I printed the nativity scripts and the characters and gave everyone a candle. Then everyone who could read read a section in turn and the kids added their piece. I was too into leading this year's service to take any pictures but will try to get some next year. 

Family Caroling Book

I also made a caroling book with the full lyrics of all the songs and popular secular songs too. If you are from Oklahoma, I also included the B.C. Clark's anniversary sale lyrics.  If you know, you know. 

Merry Christmas!