“The Best Christmas Pageant Ever”: Your Family’s New Holiday Classic

(Originally published by Meridian Magazine)

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever has warmth, wit, nostalgia, laughs, and meaning—everything you want in a Christmas movie, or any movie for that matter. It is an instant classic and the best Christmas movie I’ve ever seen.

Beth is our narrator. She tells us about one particularly important Christmas in her childhood.

She starts by telling us how her and her classmates were the perpetual victims of a group of hooligans named the Herdmans. These feral children beat, destroyed, and stole from the children in the town of Emmanuel—including Beth’s favorite locket.

Beth prays that God will save her from the Herdmans, suggesting He send them to a remote village or turn her invisible.

When they stole the dessert from the lunch of Beth’s brother, he taunted that he could get all the dessert he wanted after church where they would never go.

The Herdmans are led by oldest daughter Imogene, who does take them to church and hears about the Christmas pageant and decides she can be a star like in the movies. She threatens the other kids into not volunteering, and Beth’s mother, an emergency replacement director, has to deal with the Herdmans while also meeting the expectations of her community that loves the pageant.

Beth’s mother, Grace, is played by Judy Greer, who you might know from Antman or 13 Going on 30. Greer gives a perfect performance. It’s so easy in movies for our characters to reject the expectations of their communities because of greater enlightenment. But while Grace insists on letting the Herdmans participate, she also cares deeply about serving her community. And Greer is able to play all those beats with wit, charm, grit, and pathos.

The screenplay pulls off the trick of helping you more fully see the Herdmans, without ever softening the true difficulty of working with them. Their father left, and their mother is never around, so the pageant is the first time they are learning the Christmas story.

You likely don’t remember hearing the Christmas story for the first time. But this movie allows us to experience the story like we are learning it, by seeing it through the eyes of the Herdman children.

The way this film allowed me to experience the Christmas story feels like a gift. I will long be grateful for that gift.

The movie’s power comes in large part from the performance of Beatrice Schneider who plays Imogene. Imogene has had to take on the weight of raising her siblings. In one moment of self-doubt she looks at a painting of Mary who she describes as beautiful and pure, and wonders how she could ever be that. A lot of characters grow and change during this movie, perhaps none more than Imogene, and it would be easy to play the character as disjointed and inconsistent, Schneider manages to find the cohesion so that the audience can fully embrace the journey her character goes on. The epilogue for her character brought several tears to my eye.

I won’t tell you how Beth’s prayer is answered in the end. But I will say that this is a wise movie about wise religion.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever represents top level work from all the artisans involved. Their Christmas of yesterday comes fully to life. There are a few characters around the edges who come across flatter than I would have liked, but that’s the closest to a criticism I can come up with.

Dallas Jenkins who directed this film deserves immense credit for pulling it all off. Too many lesser “faith-based films” feel like the religion is slathered on like an oily gravy, it’s everywhere and yet it’s inessential just lying there on top. Here the religion is all the way to the movie’s bones. It’s satisfying because it’s honest.

This is a Christmas movie for people who love Christmas, real Christmas, not the shallow or sanitized version we often get on the screen, but the true unrestrained messy radiant glory of Christmas.

I recommend this movie to everyone. My kids will watch it every year. Though I suppose I should note that the Herdmans smoke in the film.

Four and a half out of five stars. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever was released in theaters nationwide on November 8, 2024.