The twenty-fourth day before Christmas

Hey!

In honor of the first day of December, here's the beginning of the best Christmas book ever, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. Dad read this one aloud to us every year, while Big Sister claimed to HATE it (though not as much as she disliked Uncle Mistletoe. I'll save that one for another day).  We would all start laughing pages in advance of the funny parts, and Dad would have to pass the book around the dinner table to whomever could still breathe.

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 tool-shed.

And because I just can't resist, here are a couple of other favorite passages.

There was also a sign in the yard that said "Beware Of The Cat."

New kids always laughed about that till they got a look at the cat. It was the meanest looking animal I ever saw. It had one short leg and a broken tall and one missing eye, and the mailman wouldn't deliver anything to the Herdmans because of it.

"I don't think it's a regular cat at all," the mailman told my father. I think those kids went up in the hills and caught themselves a bobcat."

"Oh, I don't think you can tame a wild bobcat," my father said.

"I'm sure you can't," said the mailman. "They'd never try to tame it; they'd just try to make it wilder than it was to begin with."

Have you ever done a Google image search for "cat on a length of chain"?  Don't bother.  Flickr, on the other hand:

This cat is way too pretty, of course.

And then there's Alice:

"I don't think it's very nice to say Mary was pregnant," Alice Wendleken whispered to me.

"But she was," I pointed out. In a way, though, I agreed with her. It sounded too ordinary. Anybody could be pregnant. "Great with child" sounded better for Mary.

"I'm not supposed to talk about people being pregnant." Alice folded her hands in her lap and pinched her lips together. "I'd better tell my mother."

"Tell her what?"

"That your mother is talking about things like that in church. My mother might not want me to be here."

I was pretty sure she would do it. She wanted to be Mary, and she was mad at Mother. ...Mrs. Wendleken didn't even want cats to have kittens or birds to lay eggs, and she wouldn't let Alice play with anybody who had two rabbits.

She's just so... Alice-y.