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/Independent ArticleIndependent Article
NATIVITY REBORN: How A Christmas Tradition Is Getting A Festive Facelift
(Newspaper Article published in The Independent: Dec 2009)
And, lo, Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus were forced to flee Bethlehem because of the massacre of newborn babies by the evil King Herod. And so they crossed the desert to Egypt where they rented a room from the Hermopolis estate agents, Pyramids-R-Us, and won permits to stay through their ability to answer quiz questions about the local gods and pharaohs. And everyone stood up and sang: 
“So you want to live in Egypt,
You’ve got a lot of learn,
Before you can live or work here,
Before you can start to earn …”
No, it isn’t the nativity story as we normally know it but the essential elements –the birth in the stable, the Wise Men and the Shepherds – are all there. Joseph sports a suitably traditional headcloth, and the seven- and eight-year-olds at North Ealing Primary School are having a fine old time belting out songs as they rehearse for their Christmas play, The Egyptian Nativity. This is definitely a new twist on the old story, but it preserves the essence of a school nativity play and seems sure to bring the house down on the night.
This is the week when the short but intense annual nativity season gets underway and thousands of parents prepare to park themselves in primary school halls to smile proudly at the thespian antics of their offspring – and dab their eyes as sweet, young voices are raised in Christmas song. But they might be very surprised if they knew where many of these inventive school plays come from. While some schools still lovingly write their own scripts and play their own pianos, growing numbers are doing it the 21st century way by going online to order a complete nativity package.
For little more than the price of a Christmas pub lunch they can buy a script, backing tracks, and song CDs from one of a number of companies set up to take the hard graft out of school stagecraft. This is the third year North Ealing Primary School has gone down this road, and Sarah Horgan, who teaches Year Four, says it is a godsend.
“We were looking for a school play and neither of the two of us who were involved with it could play music, so it was good to get the script, the music and everything. The first year we did ‘The Right Shepherds’ and it was very, very successful so we decided to do it again [with the best selling C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S Spells Christmas For JUNIORS]. We can put the CDs on at odd moments, at the end of the day or when the children are changing for PE, which helps them learn the songs, and the script comes as a word document, so you can easily take bits out, or add bits in…”
Read the rest of this article at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/schools/nativity-reborn-how-a-christmas-tradition-is-getting-a-festive-facelift-1837052.html
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