Sam as Joseph

Despite the twists and turns of Archie’s recent attention seeking, today was a day that had been written large in the diary of family events for a long time.  Today was Sam’s Poppets’ nativity.  Poppets is Sam’s pre school and it is lead by one of those people who may well be an actual angel inhabiting the body of a human – Lynn.  Lynn is a wonder to behold, running an organization down in the basement of a local theatre that is nurturing, absorbing and generally an outstanding place to be.  It makes you jealous of small children that they have such a place to go.  In fact, when Archie was born Lynn and Anita (another member of staff) were two of the people who helped us cope through those first two weeks.  Lynn simply informed us that Sam was going to be a full time member of Poppets for the whole of the week, and Anita walked Sam from Poppets to school at the end of each day to hand him over to whoever was picking the boys up.  When we tried to pay for the extra sessions, Lynn refused to accept anything.

So, for a long time Hilary had been working on me to make sure that I was going to be able to take part of this morning off so that I could go and watch this big event.  Ollie had been in it a couple of years before and he was the actual Star what the wise men followed.  He stood in this luminous golden outfit and said ‘Hello everybody’ into the microphone.  Great stuff!  I watched that on the video, and this year Hilary and I were looking forward to seeing Sam’s version.

As I understood it, and as it turned out to be, the Poppets’ Nativity is a fairly unstructured thing.  It is held in the Regent Centre, a local theatre staffed and run by volunteers.  Parents fill the auditorium, craning their necks to admire their little darlings potter about and retell the nativity story.  Anticipation hangs thickly in the air and there are more cameras and video recorders than at a film premiere.

Lynn, however, is not interested in the parents.  It is all about the children for her, and we are all gently but firmly reminded by her at the start that the children have been given the choice of what to dress as, or not to dress up at all, and they are allowed to make the choices about how much they engage with the nativity.  ‘They are little people and we have to respect their choices’ she says.  We all nod meekly and agree with her wisdom.

There was an air of doubt about whether Hilary was going to be able to go having been closeted away in the hospital with Archie, but we also knew that he was in good hands in the hospital and I could pick Hilary up, drive to Christchurch, watch the nativity and return within 3 hours – Archie’s feeding pattern.  Besides, if he wasn’t going to be safe in the high dependency ward of a hospital I don’t know where he would have been. Hilary’s mum was along as well, however, and we dropped her off to take over the Archie minding while we scarpered off for a bit of Christmas culture.

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As the nativity started, the children all emerged from the bowels of the theatre in a variety of costumes, and it is a little like the emergence of the contestants on ‘Stars in their Eyes’.  Parents eagerly scan the little faces desperate to catch the first glimpse of their child and discover whether they are a cow, an angel, a star, shepherd or camel.

We were the same.  Children came and went but there was no sign of Sam.  After travelling all this way, it would have been typical of our current luck that Sam had decided not to be involved and stay downstairs playing with the tractors.  And then out came Mary and Joseph and blow me down if our little curly topped dynamo wasn’t the carpenter himself.  Dressed in his red stripey robes and holding Mary’s hand, Sam took the stage with no sign of nerves and then he just went along with whatever Lyn suggested.  Lovely.  He even randomly sang everyone his version of ‘Away in a Manger’ – it’s linked below but because of child protection issues we are only able to post the audio.

Sam singing ‘Away in a Manger’. Aged 3.

Go go go Joseph!!