[Seek] The Strangest Christmas Pageant Ever

[Advent 22]

Once upon a time an extremely weird creative person decided that what the world her community needed was a virtual Christmas pageant. It would be wonderful! She's send out parts to various people who would record themselves saying their lines and then she would edit it all together into a beautiful Christmas pageant video. After dreaming about the masterpiece that was to be created for a few moments, it dawned on her that getting people to read all the lines for various parts of a pageant and record themselves doing so and emailing said recordings to someone was asking a lot in this day and age. It would also limit the number of people who could participate. 

So she had another idea. Give people short lines - like five words or less short lines. Let them pick which one(s) they want to do. Give them plenty of time to send in the recordings. Set the deadline a couple days before she actually needed the videos so she could extend the deadline and all the last-minute people could get their recordings to her. 

And best of all - don't give anyone sending videos in any clue as to what the pageant is. 

Would you believe that people willingly sent videos of themselves saying "yo, sheep!" without knowing what that had to do with Christmas? Or yelling "Don't Panic!" or baaaa-ing like a sheep? Some people sent in a single video, some a few versions of the same line, and some covered them all. It was spectacular. 

This crazy eccentric woman then asked her strange children (no crossing out needed) to help her with the rest of the pageant. After all, someone had to act it out. And do voiceovers. And play sing an intro song. Three of her children, who are more like a child who is twelve going on forty-two and two young adults, volunteered to help. Grabbing their cat head and monkey head masks, they were off to church to don costumes and procure props and film the most wrong epic Christmas pageant ever filmed. 

Videos received, voiceovers done, it was finally time to edit this mess masterpiece. Ten hours later, video saved and back-up made, it was time to get some sleep. Upon waking in the morning, the woman thought - let's show this to my husband to see what he thinks. Which she did. And it was spectacular. An hour or so later she went to put a few last tweaks on the video and add the credits and that's when everything went wrong.

Audio was missing from half the clips, and those that had audio, had audio from video files that weren't even in the editor. The angel Gabriel was apparently giving one of Pastor Rachel's sermons. The shepherds sounded an awful lot like Sylvia, talking about the angel Gabriel's visit to Mary. Mary was singing with Lynne's voice.

But alas, there was a backup file. Which turned out to have the same issues as the original. 

Closing the program, throwing a fit crying a little, and reloading everything didn't help. Neither did rebooting the computer. So the woman decided to start again from scratch. She opened the video editor, started a new project, and began copying the contents of the folder containing the pageant file into the new project. Suddenly the sky opened up and a band of heavenly angels sang and  the editing bar filled up with videos and images and audio, just where they were in the original edit. Cautiously, the woman began to play the video project and it seemed to be intact, with correct audio. She immediately exported the video to a video file before something else could go amiss. And thus the pageant was resurrected.

With another hour of editing and making sure all was as it should be, the pageant was finally finished. 

So now I bring you good news of great joy! 

The Strangest Christmas Pageant Ever, a virtual community Christmas pageant, is complete and will premiere on Our Savior Thomaston's YouTube channel and Facebook page at 4PM on Sunday, December 20th (today)! 

YouTube: https://youtu.be/ggRahsjBc1s 

Facebook: click here 

Everyone is welcome to invite friends, family, and congregations to join all of us for the premiere or to watch it anytime afterwards, as it will continue to be available on both Facebook and YouTube. I'm not sure you're prepared for the final product, but we sure had fun making it! Be ready for the unexpected - and to laugh (hopefully!). It's definitely a pageant created in 2020 for people who have reached the end of 2020 with at least some of their sense of humor intact. 

Blessed Christmas!!!