Best Christmas Story Started in Blanding

With the recent movie release of “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” (which comes to Blanding Dec 13-19) some may not know it has a strong Blanding connection which started in 1981, when Melissa Tatro was a teacher at Blanding Elementary. She loved working with students was very pro-active in enhancing student experiences. She contacted our PTA officers and let them know that Barbara Robinson was her aunt, and that she might be willing to come to Blanding to talkabout writing and her recent publishing success, Best Christmas Pageant Ever! Thus began San Juan’s love for the Herdman family and their Christmas antics!

~~ The Blanding PTA wrote a proposal to the Utah Council for the Humanities asking for financial help to pay for Mrs. Robinson to travel from Ohio and to conduct 3 days of workshops in the San Juan School District in April of 1982. She was a great presenter and walked us through the creation and writing process of the Christmas Pageant creation. Robinson wrote more than 40 short stories for newspapers and magazines, including McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal; however, her most popular work, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, however was her big runaway success. In the novel, the Herdmans (none of whom had ever heard the Bible’s Christmas story) offer their own wild and irreverent interpretation of the celebration, when they take over the annual holiday pageant one Sunday at church. Robinson went on to adapt the book for both the stage and for television in the 1980s, and it has sold more than 3.3 million copies in all editions.

~~ Since then, the “Pageant” has been performed in Blanding at least five times. When Emma Ward was 11, she was in the play. Emma recalled, “At that time I wore glasses, but Mrs. Adams didn’t want me to wear them, and I could hardly see where the edge of the stage was, I was so blind. I was always afraid I was going to fall off.” She went on to be SJHS senior & Sterling Scholar candidate in Drama. Robinson created two sequels starring the Herdmans, The Best School Year Ever (HarperCollins, 1994) and The Best Halloween Ever (HarperCollins, 2004). Though she enjoyed various styles of writing over the course of her career, she noted on her web site that she was “most happily an author of children’s books, because there’s no greater audience than boys and girls who read books and demand that those books be the most exciting, the most mysterious, the most touching, the funniest... the best.”

~~ Other books of Barbara Robinson are The Fattest Bear in the First Grade, Across from Indian Shore, My Brother Louis Measures Worms and other Louis stories, Temporary Times, Temporary Places and Trace through the Forest, My Brother Louis Measures Worms, Robinson was born and grew up in southern Ohio, in the river town of Portsmouth. She often credited her life in that small town as inspiring her writing, saying that it provided “great stuff to feed the imagination.” An avid reader and writer from an early age, Robinson followed her passion for both drama and writing when she attended Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. She graduated in 1948 and passed awayJuly 9, 2013.