Christmas 2 – Holiday Club

This is part of my Christmas series, talking about the things we did at church this Christmas that were a little more interesting or different than the things we normally do.

We do an Easter, Christmas and summer holiday club every year with another church. We do similar things every year – games, singing, crafts, God slots, etc.  This year at Christmas we decided to do things a little bit different.

We included some games and crafts and singing but we built it around something more special. Over the course of the morning we put on a nativity.

As the children arrived they could decide who they wanted to be. If we had 50 Mary’s that was okay because we would make it work. In school plays and the variety of nativity’s, children tend to be told what part they’re going to play. Then one day you end up speaking to a group of adults and if they have been in any sort of nativity you can easily have a conversation of “I never got to be…”. I've heard this from a variety of people, “I never got to be Mary because I was blonde”, “I never got to be a wise man, I was always the donkey”, etc. So we let the children be whoever they wanted to.  As it happened we ended up with about 8 wise men, many donkeys and no Joseph, but we made it work.

Doing a nativity in this way creates problems with costumes because you don’t know how many wise men outfits you need until the children come and you can’t have some costumes better than others because that creates many issues on it’s own. So we made it possible. I collected all the costumes at a pound shop, buying different coloured plastic bags to represent different characters. Blue for Mary, green for shepherds, purple for wise men, etc. When the time came we cut the bottoms off the bags and tied other plastic bags around the waists for belts or used other to made capes or headscarves. But we had to distinguish between angels and sheep so during one of the craft sessions we made bits to go with the costumes - sheep tails, donkey masks and headdresses, angel wings, shepherd crooks, wise men crowns. During another craft session we made the props and other bits – wise men gifts, a manger, extra cardboard sheep and a chance to paint a nativity backdrop (an idea I stole from our messy church session – see Christmas post number 1).

The children could choose to do the different crafts each session, bits for their own costumes and then do any other bits of the crafts or anything extra they wanted.

During the morning we learnt a song that we sang during the nativity, did a practise and played some of our usual games while also learning about the nativity story as there would be some children who might not know it.

We invited parents to join us for the last 15minutes of the holiday club to watch the nativity. It was a very simple nativity, with a narrator (a role I took for myself) reading out the lines the children with those parts had to repeat.  Actions and stage directions were also read out as part of the narrator role (e.g. “Then Mary and Joseph sat down and the shepherds sat behind them”). As you can imagine there were some amusing moments, but you always need those in a nativity, maybe it made it more authentic...

It was a fantastic holiday club (hampered only by some major snowfalls which meant some children couldn’t come) and gave us a chance to invite parents and share the Christmas story with them.