Blanding’s Connection to The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

by Janet Wilcox
Contributing writer
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever comes to the San Juan Theater Dec 13-19 but some may not know it has a strong Blanding connection which started in 1981 when Melissa Tatro was a teacher at Blanding Elementary.  
Tatro loved working with students and was very proactive in enhancing student experiences.  She contacted the PTA officers and let them know that Barbara Robinson was her aunt, and that she might be willing to come to Blanding to talk about 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 Robinson’s travel from Ohio and for three 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,” said teacher Pam Bronson.  
Robinson wrote more than 40 short stories for newspapers and magazines, including McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal. Her most popular work, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, was her big runaway success.
In the novel, the Herdmans (none of whom had heard the Bible 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 television in the 1980s, and it sold more than 3.3 million copies in all editions.
Bronson said, “I remember her talking to our BES students about the writing process.  She gave some history of how the idea for Best Christmas Pageant came about.” 
It started as a published short story then expanded to book size. 
“The PTA officers must have ordered copies of the book from the publisher because I obtained an autographed copy.  Since that time, I’ve read portions of the story to my classes in December and often showed the television production starring Loretta Switt. The school district I worked for in Texas used the book as one of their approved literature units as well.”
Many years ago, a group in Blanding put on a production of the Best Christmas Pageant which Melissa Tatro and her sister Laura attended. They had never seen a live production of the story, which of course was fabulous. 
“So much local talent we have in our little community,” Pam Bronson added. “One year our ward in Texas even performed the story for our Ward Christmas party and that was the Best Christmas Party I ever attended!  I don’t know how many times the story has been produced in Blanding.”  
Since then, the “Pageant” has been performed in Blanding at least five times.  When Emma Ward was 11, she was in the play.
Emma recalls, “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.” Emma went on to be the San Juan Sterling Scholar in Drama.
Robinson created two sequels starring the Herdmans, The Best School Year Ever  (1994) and The Best Halloween Ever (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, and Temporary Times, Temporary Places. 
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 drama and writing when she attended Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. She graduated in 1948 and passed away 
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever was first performed in 2017 by Edge of the Seaters, Blanding’s local theatre group. But that grant written many years ago by the PTA had a profound effect on many families and San Juan County residents.