Ordinary Time

[J] My brother-in-law and I are directing the Christmas pageant again this year. It's year two for us. Before last year, my mother was responsible for about 143 years (give or take...) of Christmas pageants, without a break. Each year, she'd invent, devise, adapt, or plagiarize a new script for the first half of the Christmas eve pageant. (The second half featured pretty much the same nativity story each time, with a few variations.) Each December, under her forceful direction, hundreds of milling, mewling children would transform into thespians straight out of the Old Vic. The original (more or less) scripts that she'd write each year allowed her to add something new to the nativity story, and to explore or invent new tales of Christmas. There are extant scripts featuring a cobbler, a juggler, talking animals, Saint Nicholas (the real one, not Santa Claus!), Saint Francis, and a wide variety of characters. Often she'd find an existing story to adapt, like the story &qu