Narrator's Father

Narrator's Father is the narrator’s initially reluctant audience for the annual Christmas pageant, a role that makes his eventual response a measure of how the performance has changed. He repeatedly dismisses the pageant as nothing new; after hearing the story reconsidered from the Herdmans’ perspective, however, he recognizes the indignity at its center, and at the end calls the production quite a pageant.

Identity and Introduction

At the start, Narrator's Father expects the pageant to repeat itself. Each year, he tells Narrator's Mother, “I’ve seen the Christmas pageant.” Her answer is that he has not seen this year’s version: Charlie is a shepherd. His reply—that Charlie was a shepherd last year, followed by an announcement that he will stay home in his bathrobe by the fire—reduces the annual performance to a familiar routine. He assumes its essential features will not change, whatever the children’s assigned roles.

Resistance to the Pageant

Once Narrator's Mother is put in charge, he proposes canceling the pageant and showing movies instead. Asked what the movies would be about, he offers Fred Stamper’s reels of Yellowstone National Park. The suggestion reinforces his impatience with a production whose familiar staging seems to him to have exhausted its possibilities. That impatience has a concrete basis in the family’s account of the event: the angel choir is arranged by height because the children cannot sing parts, and the pageant typically consists of people moving about in bathrobes and bedsheets. The annual repetition is a source of comedy, but it also establishes the narrow expectations his later response will revise.

A Changed Perspective on the Story

After the pageant, Narrator's Father wants to hear how it went. Narrator's Mother asks him to imagine never having heard the Christmas story before, then being told it for the first time. He considers the premise for a moment and answers that it would seem disgraceful that no one could find a pregnant woman a room except in a stable. His response shifts attention from the story’s customary familiarity to the circumstances it describes. The narrator is astonished that he has taken the same side as the Herdmans, whose reactions have unsettled the congregation’s habitual understanding of the story. His agreement is not presented as a wholesale identification with them; it is a pointed recognition that their objection makes sense.

The Pageant's Aftermath

At the church, after the costumes have been put away and the collapsible manger folded, Narrator's Father helps extinguish the last tall white candle. He says that it is all over and that it was quite a pageant, then asks Narrator's Mother what she is carrying. She explains that it is the ham the Herdmans would not accept, and that they also refused the candy and little Bibles. Imogene did ask for the Bible-story pictures, taking out the picture of Mary and calling it exactly right. Narrator's Father’s closing approval contrasts with his earlier certainty that the pageant never differed; the performance has at least made him revise his judgment of this year’s version. The final exchange also places his response beside the Herdmans’ refusal of ordinary gifts and Imogene’s particular interest in the image of Mary, without claiming that he knows what that choice means.