Humor

Brady’s World: Journal Entry Four

Dear journal, the holidays are here, and with them come a break from school, a dusting of snow on the rooftops, and, of course, about thirty-eight tons of sugar cookies littering our house. Like many mothers, mine has always seen the holiday season as a good month-long opportunity for a ‘reverse diet’ – aka helping everyone else gain weight so that you seem toothpick-sized by comparison. So, to that end, there has been a similar snow-like coating of sugar on every surface in our house for about three weeks. Don’t you just love the holidays?

But, unfortunately, not everything this holiday break is quite as perfect as the powdered sugar cloud that chokes me every time I walk through the kitchen. With Christmas comes the annual Christmas pageant at Forestwood First Baptist Church, and with the Christmas pageant comes yet another opportunity for me to play a sheep. Now, after eight years of this treatment, you would think that I would start feeling stifled by this role, but future world dictators are not easily stifled. Last year, when I was assigned my part, I figured it was time for a change. Personally, I don’t see what exactly was so wrong about modifying all my lines from “bah” to “Bah Humbug”, but our Sunday school teacher Mrs. Mellyweather (who’s been leading the Christmas pageant since the original nativity) lectured me for so long afterward that you’d think I had tried to break into the Pentagon. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have tried to break into the Pentagon before, but she didn’t know that.

So, when I arrived at the first of this year’s pageant’s rehearsals, I wasn’t all that shocked to have been moved to a different part. What did shock me, however, was just how low she was willing to go.

“She made me the angel!” I cried the next day, rushing panickedly to where Randy was fixing a tail light. “Really. The angel!”

Randy turned to look at me slowly, his eyebrows scraping up against his grease-stained hairline. “Mrs. Mellyweather?”

“Who else could do such a thing?” I asked, grabbing a consolidatory Coke out of the ice box.

“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Randy, beginning to unscrew the light bulb. “God, maybe.”

“Of all the despicable things to do,” I continued, pouring a swig of the fizzy goodness down my throat. “I mean, you’ve been to the Christmas pageant before. The angel is always a cute little seven-year-old. Always. And a girl! I don’t want everyone to think that I’m a seven-year-old girl!”

He glanced across at me. “I should say you’re pretty safe.” I sighed in relief. “Unless, of course, they make you wear a dress.”

My sigh died. Surely, surely, he was just joking. I tried to console myself with that hope all week as I waited for the dreaded next rehearsal. When I got there, Mrs. Mellyweather already had the costumes laid out on tipsy plastic tables like they were some sort of national treasure. 

“Oh good!” she called, turning her nefarious gaze on me. “You’re here, Brady. I can’t wait to show you what I have for you.”

You know what was on the table? I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t a suit of armor. And, shockingly, it wasn’t a dress either. It was worse. A whole lot worse.

A pair of glittering pink and white fairy wings sat mounted in the very center of the table, staring menacingly up at me. “I can’t wear that!” I cried, backing up just in case the thing was infested. “I’ll be laughed out of church!”

“Don’t be silly,” replied Mrs. Mellyweather, smiling threateningly as she came at me with the wings. “You’ll be adorable.”

“I don’t want to be adorable!”

“Everyone wants to be adorable.”

“Tell that to The Rock.”

Unfortunately, before I could explain to her who The Rock was, my mother came in and threatened to put me on a diet of broccoli and spinach if I didn’t wear it. I told you about what our house smelled like these days, right? I guess, in some scenarios, wearing a pair of sparkly wings isn’t the worst thing that could happen, but it was close. Still, when Christmas Eve came and I tried on the wings with my mother’s giant, white bathrobe, I figured surely there was something I might still be able to do to save my reputation. That was when I noticed something about my mother’s bathrobe. Not only was it about seven sizes too big for me, but it had two big pockets on the sides. No, big wasn’t quite the right word. Try… massive pockets.

Now I wouldn’t say that what happened next was entirely my fault, but I do think it was safe to say that when I stepped onto that stage and untied my bathrobe to reveal my black leather jacket below, putting on my hidden biker shades in the process, there wasn’t anyone in the whole world who had ever seen quite as suave an angel as they did that night. And you know what? When I started rapping to the shepherds about needing to go “check this kid out,” Mrs. Mellyweather was the only one in the whole church not clapping along. By the time the last wise man had given his gift to the plastic baby Jesus and the last of my smuggled confetti cannons had officially been fired, the crowd was on their feet.

Once it was all over, I went over to where my family and Randy were sitting, grinning widely. “Well? How was I?”

Sylvie, my older sister, raised her eyebrows at me. “You just better be glad no one from my school goes here, you little nutcase.”

I grinned. I consider just about anything my sister hates to be an absolute win. But then… something weird happened. One by one, after the service, more and more people began coming up and congratulating my mother. Really. Not just the normal you have such a little gentleman thing either, but real compliments. They said things about how much they’d enjoyed seeing a young person really get involved with the pageant, about how such a different spin made them really think about the nativity in a new way, and even about how much my enthusiasm had touched them. Really. I’m not lying. They said it touched them.

As we rode back home to the sounds of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, I thought back. I hadn’t meant to make some sort of statement. All I’d meant to do was not be called a sissy, but somehow, it hadn’t turned out that way. Maybe that’s part of what makes Christmas so special. Maybe it’s about God taking all our messes and goof-offs and sugar-filled houses and turning them into something better, something a whole lot more important than a pair of pink and white fairy wings.

“Hey mom?” I asked as we got back home. “Do you think we could celebrate my performance tonight with sugar cookies?”

She smiled. “Of course! How about… an angel cookie?”

“On second thought…  I’ll pass.”

 

Photo credit: Sabina Boyer

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