Parent life / Christmas productions
A Nativity Shepherd's Costume for £2.49, Plus One Tea Towel
British school Christmas plays run on kitchen linen. One mother set out to beat the supermarket's £8 shepherd costume and kept the receipts.
Whiteley Primary School in England once sent home a costume letter for its Year 3 Christmas production asking every child to bring a tea towel and something to keep it on their head. Every child. The cast list, for good measure, included a tea towel seller.
For American readers: a tea towel is a dish towel. In Britain, at Christmas, it is also a shepherd's headdress, and every kitchen in the country loses one for a week in December.
In 2012 the parenting blogger Jennifer Jain learned that her three-year-old had been cast as a shepherd in his preschool Nativity. She was "very relieved," since it was the first costume she had been asked to provide. A supermarket sold a ready-made shepherd costume for £8. She set herself a challenge: make one cheaper.
Among the receipts: a brown pillowcase, £1.96 for two; brown ribbon, 50p for a remnant. Total, by her count: £2.49. She cut holes for the head and arms, put Velcro down a slit in the back, and sewed two ribbons down the front by hand, a bit wonky. She did not have a sewing machine, and reasoned that a real shepherd would have sewn his own clothes without one too.
That is the most persuasive justification for wonky stitching I have ever read, and I intend to use it on everything.
Then came the tea towel, tied on with cord, and the crook, made from an old net-curtain pole with a cardboard hook, sellotaped, covered in paper and painted brown. "I'm fully expecting the teachers to take it off him for health and safety reasons," she wrote, "as he does have a tendency to brandish it wildly!"
That is a woman who knows her son.
Not every shepherd is relieved, of course. A parent on a British forum once asked how to persuade a daughter that being cast as Shepherd 1 was not the worst role in the Nativity. Parents see a simple costume. Children see a supporting role.
The middle one was a sheep in our church pageant, at five. I made his costume from cotton balls and a white sweatshirt for $11.40, which beat the store's $24. He shed cotton balls down the aisle like a molting cloud, and baa'd during the reading, and then, at the manger, brandished his own crook, which nobody had given him and which turned out to be our umbrella. He was not asked to give it back. He had a tendency to brandish it wildly.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Whiteley Primary Year 3 Christmas-production costume letter whiteleyprimary.co.uk
- Jennifer Jain: How to make a Nativity Play Shepherd’s costume from a pillowcase jenniferslittleworld.com
- Public parent question about a daughter cast as Shepherd 1 reddit.com