Sunday school

Sunday school is the children’s regular setting for religious instruction and church activities, but in the story it becomes much more than a predictable weekly routine: Charlie’s account of it draws the Herdmans into the church, and their unfamiliar questions unsettle the congregation’s practiced understanding of Christmas. What begins as a search for refreshments opens a place in the community for children whom others had learned to avoid.

Setting and Routine

Once a month, the Sunday school gathers in the Church for the first fifteen minutes of the service and presents something special, such as a song, a parable, or Bible verses. The youngest children usually sing “Jesus Loves Me,” a familiar choice suited to what they can manage. These activities establish Sunday school as both a teaching setting and a public one: children’s lessons are carried from their separate classes into the congregation.

That routine is also shaped by repetition and limited expectations. The children’s presentations are generally simple, and the familiar schedule gives adults and pupils a clear sense of what will happen. The same predictability governs the Christmas pageant. Its script centers on the inn, stable, shepherds, and star; customary casting places primary-grade children among the angels, intermediate children as shepherds, and older boys as Wise Men. Elmer Hopkins, the minister’s son, has long played Joseph, while Alice Wendleken is assigned Mary. The remaining children form the angel choir, arranged by height rather than singing ability. The pageant is an established Sunday-school undertaking, not an experimental production, and its annual return reinforces the institution’s habits as much as its religious teaching.

Charlie’s Remark and the Herdmans’ Arrival

A Sunday-school teacher once asked the youngest pupils to write or draw what they liked best about Sunday school. After several children offered cheerful answers about Jesus, God, friends, and their teacher, Charlie said that what he liked best was that the Herdmans were not there. His answer displaced everything the other children had said: the congregation remembered his blunt comment rather than their more conventionally Christian sentiments. His teacher later tried to suggest that he liked other things as well, but her smile did not conceal her anger.

The remark reflects the children’s practical experience of the Herdmans. Charlie had spent a second-grade year black-and-blue from sitting beside Leroy Herdman, so his relief was grounded in fear, not abstract dislike. The Herdmans’ reputation was already common knowledge; their father had disappeared when Gladys was two, their mother worked double shifts at a shoe factory, and the children largely looked after one another. Their conduct was not a secret that Sunday school could reveal or correct simply by naming it. Instead, the church initially appeared to Charlie as a place where their presence could be avoided.

The comment reached Leroy through an everyday exchange over lunch. After Leroy repeatedly took the dessert from Charlie’s lunch box, Charlie gave up protesting and explained that he could get all the dessert he wanted at Sunday school. Asked who supplied it, Charlie named the minister. The very next Sunday, the Herdmans arrived, slouching into the class and watching for refreshments. When Ralph asked the superintendent where to find cake, Mr. Grady directed him to food packages being collected in the kitchen for the Orphans Home. The cans of spaghetti, beans, grape drink, and peanut butter were not the promised treats, but the family stayed; Imogene also slipped coins from the passing collection basket. Their entry was thus caused by a misunderstanding, not by an initial interest in worship.

Instruction and an Unfamiliar Story

The Herdmans’ first visit coincided with preparations for the Christmas pageant. Mr. Grady announced that rehearsals would soon begin and that, after the following week’s service, the children would gather at the back of the Church to decide the main roles. He also stressed that every boy and girl in Sunday school should take part. The announcement followed an annual script, and the established casting seemed so certain that Alice Wendleken privately hoped the narrator would remain in the angel choir rather than become Mary.

The Herdmans, however, knew almost nothing about the Christmas story. They knew that Christmas marked Jesus’ birthday, but the shepherds, Wise Men, star, stable, and crowded inn were all new to them. Their ignorance had material and familial circumstances: they read Amazing Comics rather than books such as the Bible, their second-hand television worked only when someone held its antenna, their father had left before teaching them the story, and their mother had given up trying to instruct them. Gladys and Ollie had even drawn mustaches and tails on the disciples in an illustrated Bible. Their first encounter with the story therefore began not with shared familiarity but with the gap between what the congregation assumed children knew and what these children had never been taught.

The Narrator’s Mother began by reading the Biblical account aloud, an approach that bored children accustomed to being told only their assigned roles and places. The Herdmans, by contrast, listened intently. When they did not understand a word, they called for an explanation; the account of the inn having no room made Imogene sit up in astonishment. She objected to the idea that no one had made room even for Jesus. The passage about the manger prompted another question: if it was a bed, why would there be a bed in a barn? The Narrator’s Mother explained that Mary and Joseph had to use whatever was available because they had no bed for the baby. Imogene answered with a fact from her own family’s life: the Herdmans had put Gladys in a bureau drawer. The exchange makes the story’s poverty and lack of ordinary care newly concrete. The children’s questions do not merely interrupt the lesson; they force familiar listeners to hear the circumstances afresh.

Participation and Changed Understanding

The Herdmans’ presence contrasts with the Sunday school’s earlier boundary between safe fellowship and an intimidating family. Charlie’s remark had named their absence as the institution’s greatest attraction, but their arrival made them participants in its lessons and pageant preparations. Mr. Grady’s insistence that every child take part supplies a practical invitation, even as the old casting conventions remain in place. Sunday school thus holds two impulses at once: preserving a settled communal tradition and admitting children who have entered for reasons far removed from its religious purpose.

That admission eventually changes the narrator’s understanding as well. For years, the narrator had thought about the wonder and mystery of Jesus’ birth without grasping it. The Herdmans’ questions redirected attention from the pageant’s familiar assignments toward a newborn, parents in trouble, the absence of money and shelter, and the unexpected arrival of wealthy visitors from the East. Imogene did not simply repeat the congregation’s settled interpretation; the story affected her with an intensity the narrator had not previously experienced. Through the Herdmans, Sunday school becomes a place where the Christmas story is not only rehearsed but encountered again, and where children’s unfamiliarity can reveal what habitual familiarity has obscured.