The Best Christmas Pageant Ever Quotes

“I've got the baby here," Imogene barked at the Wise Men. "Don touch him! I named him Jesus.”
― Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

“They looked like the people you see on the six o’clock news—refugees, sent to wait in some strange ugly place, with all their boxes and sacks around them. It suddenly occurred to me that this was just the way it must have been for the real Holy Family, stuck away in a barn by people who didn’t much care what happened to them. They couldn’t have been very neat and tidy either, but more like this Mary and Joseph”
― Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

“The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the name of the Lord in vain and set fire to Fred Shoemaker’s old broken-down toolhouse.”
― Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

“I happened to look at Imogene and I almost dropped by hymn book on a baby angel.
Everyone had been waiting all this time for the Herdmans to do something absolutely unexpected. And sure enough, that was what happened.
Imogene Herdman was crying.
In the candlelight her face was all shiny with tears and she didn't even bother to wipe them away. She just sat there-awful old Imogene-in her crookedy veil, crying and crying and crying.
Well. It was the best Christmas pageant we ever had.”
― Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

“When they got to the part about swaddling clothes and the manger, Imogene asked, “You mean they tied him up and put him in a feedbox? Where was the Child Welfare?”
― Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever [Script Adaptation]

“The Herdmans moved from grade to grade through the Woodrow Wilson School like those South American fish that strip your bones clean in three minutes flat . . . which was just about what they did to one teacher after another.”
― Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

“cigars”
― Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

“Herdman”
― Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

“And every time you go in the girls’ room,” she went on, “the whole air is blue, and Imogene Herdman is sitting there in the Mary costume, smoking cigars!” Alice wrote all these things down, and how many times each thing happened. I don’t know why, unless it made her feel good to see, in black and white, just how awful they were. Since none of the Herdmans had ever gone to church or Sunday school or read the Bible or anything, they didn’t know how things were supposed to be.”
― Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

“hear all about the nice warm stable with all the animals breathing, and the sweet-smelling hay—but that doesn’t change the fact that they put Mary in a barn.”
― Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

“Mrs. Wendleken says all they do is talk about sex and underwear.”
― Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

“The”
― Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

“Alice”
― Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever