Baby Jesus Comes to Cabbagetown

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

One January afternoon, my friend Mary and I were strolling through our Toronto neighbourhood, Cabbagetown, talking about the Christmas pageant. Mary’s church, St. Peter’s Anglican on Carlton Street, used to produce a pageant every Christmas Eve at nearby Riverdale Farm, with local churchgoers playing wise men and shepherds, and at the end, a family with a real baby sitting in the straw of the barn. The farm’s animals loitered in their stalls on the periphery, snorting out icy December steam.

But the minister who loved singing and theatrics had recently moved away, and the new minister wasn’t interested in producing anything except sermons. There’d been no pageant that past December. We mourned the loss, Mary as a church-going Christian, and I as an atheist whose children often spent Christmas Eve with their father. Going to the farm was a joyful way to spend a solitary evening, moving with the crowd, singing the grand old carols from my childhood that always made me cry. “O Little Town...” “Silent Night.” “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” — tears dripped down my frozen cheeks as I sang.

Now the pageant would be no more. Until Mary turned to me and said, “This coming December, why don’t we do it?” And I looked at Mary and said, “Well — why not?” How hard could it be? Get a bunch of people to act the parts, tell our friends, et voilà. Right then, like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, we decided to put on a show in a barn.

Surely there’s no metropolis anywhere else in the world with a seven-acre farm smack in the middle of downtown. Cabbagetown has been my home for years, and Riverdale Farm is one of the main reasons it’s hard to imagine living anywhere else. The farm, run by the city, is free and open 365 days a year, and not much happens there. It’s not a petting zoo. Mostly, when you visit, you get to smell farm animals and watch them chew, and nothing, in the middle of a crazy city day, is more restful and reassuring than that.

I undertook the writing of our pageant script, a masterpiece of simplicity designed for an amateur cast, with one stirring line for each actor, like, “Look, the star!” As I wrote, I wrestled with the ghost of my father. Dad hated anything that smacked of organized religion and thought people who believed in God were brainwashed fools, with the exception of Albert Schweitzer. So as I wrote the line to be spoken by Wise Man #3, “We are searching for a baby, the son of God, the prince of peace,” Dad was snickering at my elbow.

Mary and I cast anyone we could drag in, mostly our children and friends, and importantly, a couple with a baby. A seamstress neighbour turned bits of material into cloaks and headdresses; the other costumes we fashioned out of bathrobes and sashes, with tea towel headgear for the Wise Men. For the final tableau in the barn, we bought angel wings for the little ones who’d stand in the manger, and for the baby’s mother, a length of bright blue sari silk from Goodwill to drape around her winter coat.

It was hard to pull the busy cast together to rehearse their line. So on opening night, which was also closing night, the co-producer, playwright, director, and stage manager — me — hadn’t even met some of them. And yet at 7 p.m. there they all were, in costume, with almost two hundred people waiting in the cold. And so it began.

Our biggest challenge each autumn is to find a baby with parents willing to spend Christmas Eve sitting in an unheated barn. Our first year’s baby boy was so perfect a few people around here still call him Jesus, though his name is Wylie and he’s now five.

That year, it was 18 below and snowing, and the carols we’d printed in the program went on for so long as our teeth chattered that I ended up shouting, “Cut to the last verse!” on every one. We redid the songbooks after that. A woman said as she left that the show was nice but someone should inform the cast that angels don’t chew gum.

Our second year’s holy family decided not to sit on the fresh bales of straw put in the manger stall by farm staff, but instead dragged in a bench. It just looked odd, the holy family in the manger, perched side by side on a bench. As baby Jesus began to howl, an old man turned to me with a beatific smile and said, “At least in one place, it feels like a real Christmas.” And then he realized the goat in the stall behind him was nibbling on his jacket.

The third year a young shepherd forgot her line and stood frozen while the narrator prompted, “Perhaps there’s a baby? A star? Leading you to the baby?” The second Wise Man, eighteen-year-old Jesse, ran over at the last minute from his job at the local beer store, put on his cloak and tea towel, climbed up on the picnic table with the two others to say his line, and ran back to work. The third Wise Man, another local boy — one closely related, in fact, to me — amused himself by making farting noises in the manger, and Joseph kept turning around to frown. My boy, at six foot three, looked strange with his huge Nike’s sticking way out from under his brown velveteen cloak. As the years go by, our sons have become increasingly resistant to doing it again.

Every year we have trouble finding Wise Men — something our pageant, and the world, have in common.

My daughter tells everyone she’s the star, which she is; she walks ahead of the crowd holding a long pole topped with a bamboo star draped in Xmas lights. When the shepherds cry, “Look, the star!” she flips a switch and the lights sparkle. The magic of special effects.

Last year, when the pageant was over and we were packing up costumes and props, Hakim the head farmer told us Matilda had just given birth. While we were celebrating a nativity in one barn, Matilda, a big black sow with ears like blinkers over her eyes, was producing her own in another. Hakim allowed us to peer through the pig barn window, to admire five bouncing Christmas piglets with ears like blinkers.

Every year, a new laugh, a new mishap. Local people are devoted to the event, though it has grown so, over the years, the size of the crowd has become a problem; some complain they can’t see, and they can’t hear. They say it goes too fast, or, when it’s really cold out, it goes too slowly. We dream of proper outdoor lights and a sound system. Mary longs for a real camel. There was talk once of our farm being affiliated with the huge city zoo, and we thought, Well, at least we’ll have our camel.

What matters is that we all end up in the barn with the shaggy majestic Clydesdale horses and Dusty the donkey, the cows, goats, and sheep, and the family with their child, surrounded by tiny solemn angels with tinsel halos and big white wings. There, in the sweet tang of animals and straw, the crowd sings “Silent Night,” and every year, exhausted and elated, I cry.

Friends have asked why I of all people am involved with this event. They know I don’t believe in God or in the divinity of a Jewish prophet named Jesus. I just love those old carols, is my explanation, and the hokey simplicity of our neighbourhood production.

But also … I regret I don’t have a formal, organized belief system to pass on to my children. I wish I could give them a creed, faith in something bigger than they are, something solid and sustaining to turn to, especially in times of grief and pain.

But perhaps I have. I believe in the power and the glory of the newly born, whether with round pink noses or snuffling bristly ones. I believe with all my being in neighbourhood; in ritual and community; in coming together at important times, to sing in celebration.

And, because of our yearly communal event, I think my children believe in those things too.

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Baby Jesus Comes to Cabbagetown is a story from Beth’s book Midlife Solo, which delivers laugh-out-loud wit and hard-won wisdom in equal measure.