Inclusion and Acceptance
What This Theme Explores
In The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, Inclusion and Acceptance asks where a community draws its boundaries and what it costs to widen them. The story probes whether tradition exists to protect insiders from disruption or to welcome those who most need belonging. It explores how fear hardens into prejudice—and how contact, curiosity, and vulnerability can soften it. Most of all, it suggests that true community is measured not by polish but by the courage to make room for the messy and misunderstood.
How It Develops
At the outset, exclusion feels like common sense. In the beginning of the story (Chapter 1-2 Summary), the Herdman children are defined as a threat to order and safety, and the church functions as a refuge from them. Even the kids absorb this gatekeeping logic: Charlie blurts out that Sunday school is good precisely because the Herdmans aren’t there. The community’s initial posture is clear—peace depends on keeping the outsiders out.
The middle movement (Chapter 3-4 Summary) throws that boundary into crisis. The Herdmans seize the lead roles, and propriety-minded families recoil. Voices like Alice Wendleken insist that the pageant’s holiness requires exclusion, while Mother and Reverend Hopkins, though reluctant, insist on an open door. This phase is awkward and unstable: rules are bent, tempers flare, and participation is offered more as a principle than as trust. Yet that brittle tolerance creates space for something unexpected to happen.
By the final performances (Chapter 5-6 Summary and Chapter 7 Summary), the community arrives braced for fiasco—and witnesses sincerity that reframes the familiar story. The Herdmans’ rough-edged choices shed the pageant’s stale polish and expose the gravity of its central miracle. What began as an experiment in tolerance becomes an encounter with grace; the town’s gaze shifts from evaluating the Herdmans to being moved by them. Acceptance lands not as a concession but as recognition: the outsiders have told the story most truly.
Key Examples
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Initial exclusion crystallized:
“What I like best about Sunday school,” he said, “is that there aren’t any Herdmans here.” This line distills the town’s unwritten rule: belonging is defined against the Herdmans. The church’s warmth depends on someone else being kept in the cold, revealing how easily community becomes a gated space.
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A moral claim for inclusion:
He just reminded everyone that when Jesus said “Suffer the little children to come unto me” Jesus meant all the little children, including Herdmans. Reverend Hopkins doesn’t romanticize the Herdmans; he recalls a principle that disrupts comfortable exclusion. The appeal grounds inclusion not in niceness but in the faith the pageant supposedly celebrates, forcing adults to live up to their own creed.
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An unexpected act of giving: The Herdmans choose to offer their charity ham to the baby Jesus—costly, concrete, and theirs to lose. Unlike symbolic bath-salts “gifts,” the ham is a real sacrifice that reframes the pageant from performance to participation. Their gift signals a turn from grabbing to giving, the moment they begin to want a place in the story rather than control over it.
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A reimagined Holy Family:
But as far as I’m concerned, Mary is always going to look a lot like Imogene Herdman—sort of nervous and bewildered, but ready to clobber anyone who laid a hand on her baby. And the Wise Men are always going to be Leroy and his brothers, bearing ham. The narrator’s private canonization of the Herdmans marks true acceptance. She no longer measures them against ideal behavior; she recognizes how their raw protectiveness and practical generosity illuminate the Nativity more honestly than tradition’s polish.
Character Connections
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The Herdmans embody the risk and reward of inclusion. They enter as marauders—grabbing roles, upsetting decorum—and slowly reveal need, hunger, and fierce loyalty. Their roughness isn’t erased; it’s redirected toward care, showing that acceptance doesn’t require sanding people down so much as giving them a story worth rising to.
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Mother becomes the unlikely steward of hospitality. Initially conscripted, she chooses to defend the Herdmans’ right to participate and to shepherd them through misunderstanding rather than eject them for it. Her stance pushes the church from theoretical welcome to lived inclusion, modeling how leadership absorbs friction to make room for others.
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Alice Wendleken personifies gatekeeping. With her notebook and certainty, she protects tradition as a performance of worthiness, equating holiness with decorum. Her resistance clarifies the theme: when ritual becomes a purity test, it loses the very compassion it was meant to honor.
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The narrator tracks the community’s moral learning curve. She moves from fear and avoidance to astonished admiration, translating the pageant’s upheaval into new understanding. Her shift shows acceptance as a change in imagination—seeing not who people have been, but what they might become inside a larger, truer story.
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Reverend Hopkins provides the ethical anchor. His reminder of “all the little children” reframes inclusion as fidelity to the Gospel rather than permissiveness. By invoking principle, he creates the conditions in which grace can surprise everyone—including him.
Symbolic Elements
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The church pageant: Once a tidy showcase for insider competence, it becomes a laboratory for the community’s values. With the Herdmans at its center, the pageant ceases to be a polished repetition and turns into an honest encounter with vulnerability, danger, and need—much closer to the original Nativity.
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The Herdmans’ ham: Practical, precious, and personally costly, the ham cuts through ceremonial niceties. It symbolizes a shift from gesture to sacrifice and from audience to participant—evidence that acceptance deepens when people offer what they truly have.
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The church building: Intended as a house of welcome, it initially operates as a social filter. The story uses the sanctuary as a mirror, challenging the congregation to align its practices with its preached ideals.
Contemporary Relevance
The town’s journey maps onto modern communities wrestling with class, culture, and reputation. Schools, workplaces, and faith groups still drift toward comfort, mistaking order for justice and tradition for truth. The book argues that inclusion is not sentimental charity but a path to rediscovering meaning: outsiders see what insiders forget, and their presence revitalizes tired rituals. Welcoming the disruptive other remains the test of whether our values are slogans or lived commitments.
Essential Quote
But as far as I’m concerned, Mary is always going to look a lot like Imogene Herdman—sort of nervous and bewildered, but ready to clobber anyone who laid a hand on her baby. And the Wise Men are always going to be Leroy and his brothers, bearing ham.
This vision seals the transformation from tolerance to affection. By permanently recasting sacred figures in the Herdmans’ image, the narrator declares that holiness resides in fierce care and costly giving—not in manners. Acceptance here is not erasing difference but honoring how the “wrong” people can tell the right story most truly.