Christmas Around the World: CCFT Night
By Darlene Ramos
December 18, 2008.
It's not everyday that children get to dress up and play a red-nosed reindeer or Joseph and Mary - or a Christmas tree, for that matter. So when Christmas pageant night comes around, once a year, everyone is in high spirits. Tonight, after all, is the first time that CCFT-Coron International School will be holding the Christmas performance in Coron's Pavilion Hall. The afternoon before the show, students and teachers all huddled in groups, singing a snatch or two of a carol, muttering memorized lines, and fussing over costumes. Here fingers are sticky with last-minute glue and glitters, there random spikes of hay poke out from the manger-makers' hair, and somewhere in the confusion, an angel's wing needs more cotton.
A higgledy-piggledy ride on the CCFT jeepney down to town - with wisps, then chunks of the Nativity hut tied to its roof falling prey to overhanging branches - brought the children to the Pavilion Hall. There were last minute touch-ups, a panicked hunt for Rudolf's red nose and fur coat, a vain patch-up of the wrecked hut, and the show began.
And as if angels were standing by, the children sang and danced through their numbers like a dream. The black-light mime of the "battle of good and evil", awkward in daylight rehearsals, was now ominous and striking on the darkened stage. The Grade 1 speech choir now featured Joseph and Mary in their journey through Bethlehem looking for a place for Mary to give birth to the Savior. The one-act play, "Christmas Around the World", with impishly comic Christmas decorations and a nose-less Rudolf surrounded by dancing preschoolers, drew laughs from the audience. A solemn "Silent Night" closed the performance, the sound of children's voices blending together, warm and sweet in the cold night air
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