Herdman family

The Herdman family is a household of six children introduced through a reputation for cruelty, mischief, and fire-setting. Their turn toward the Church and The Herdman Christmas pageant makes them the focus of a community that expects trouble, then discovers that the children’s presence can change what the pageant means to its audience.

Identity and Background

Ralph Herdman, Imogene Herdman, Leroy Herdman, Claude Herdman, Ollie Herdman, and Gladys Herdman are described as skinny, stringy-haired children who resemble one another apart from their different sizes and the black-and-blue marks left by knocking into each other. The narrator presents their conduct as pervasive: they lie and steal, smoke cigars—including the girls—talk dirty, hit younger children, curse teachers, take the Lord’s name in vain, and set fires. Their reputation is so extreme that the narrator initially imagines them headed for the state penitentiary.

The family lives over an unused garage at the bottom of Sproul Hill. The children turn the garage door into part of a rough game, banging it up and down as fast as possible while trying to squash one another. Their yard contrasts with the conventional suburban image around them: it has rocks instead of grass, poison ivy instead of hydrangeas, and a sign warning people to beware of the cat. The details make the Herdmans’ home feel like an extension of the unruly world associated with the children.

Family Life and the Toolhouse Fire

The Herdman children largely look after themselves. Their mother would rather be at the shoe factory than shut up at home with the children, and responsibility passes down the sibling line: Ralph looks after Imogene, Imogene looks after Leroy, Leroy looks after Claude, and the arrangement continues. The older children teach the younger ones what they know; in the narrator’s pointed assessment, the youngest, Gladys, has become the meanest of them all. Their household is therefore both unsupervised and self-organizing, with the children’s influence on one another helping perpetuate their behavior.

The family’s fire-setting culminates in Fred Shoemaker’s toolhouse fire. The old, broken-down building burns to the ground, surprising the children: they set fires often, but had never before managed to burn down an entire building. The narrator guesses the blaze was accidental, while allowing that the children might have planned it. Whatever their intent, the fire teaches them that a fire brings free doughnuts sooner or later.

The neighborhood’s response complicates the usual condemnation of the family. The toolhouse was already close to collapse, neighbors had pressed Mr. Shoemaker to deal with it because it looked awful and might attract rats, and he felt relieved when it was gone. People called the fire a blessing in disguise. Narrator's Father judged it the only good thing the children had ever done, while the narrator adds the irony that, had the children known it was good, they would have set fire to something—or somebody—else. Their notoriety makes even an accidental benefit difficult to separate from the danger they represent.

Relationship with the Church and the Pageant

The narrator frames the family’s involvement with the Church, Narrator's Mother, and the Christmas pageant as a turning point in how their story unfolds. Before that entanglement, the children seem destined for punishment and exclusion; once they are involved, they become central to the community’s Christmas preparations. Their presence brings the family into contact with people and institutions that had previously regarded them chiefly through their reputation.

The audience’s expectations remain wary rather than celebratory. Reverend Hopkins fears that nobody will come to see the pageant, but he is wrong: everybody comes to see what the Herdman family will do. The crowd’s motive captures the family’s unusual position in the community. They are not expected to conform to the familiar pageant or behave as a conventional cast might; their unpredictable presence itself becomes the attraction.

Change and Narrative Role

The Herdman family’s importance lies in the contrast between the label attached to them and the attention their participation commands. At first, the narrator’s account piles up evidence of misconduct and treats the children as almost impossibly bad. The fire episode briefly reverses that judgment when a destructive act removes a derelict building, but even this apparent good is filtered through the family’s established reputation and the narrator’s dry suspicion that they would avoid repeating anything praised as beneficial.

Their entrance into the Church and The Herdman Christmas pageant shifts the story from an account of feared children toward a communal encounter with them. The available scenes establish the change in circumstance and audience expectation without erasing the children’s earlier conduct: the neighbors still come largely to witness the unexpected. The family thus serves as the force that unsettles ordinary assumptions about who belongs in the church community and what a Christmas pageant can become.