Angel Gabriel calling Mary on Zoom to tell her that she’s expecting the baby Jesus. A trip to the countryside and some furloughed shepherds.
As the unfamiliar becomes familiar amid the pandemic, the nativity is no different – with schools across the country getting creative in their depictions of the traditional play.
“We didn’t want it to look like a filmed stage show, or a bit ‘naff’. We wanted it to be as realistic as possible,” said Jo Goode, headteacher of Grasmere Primary School in Cumbria.
Unable to hold the traditional play in church due to Covid-19 restrictions, the school took 70 schoolchildren to the Lake District countryside, in their local area, to shoot the 20-minute film. In a revamped script, the play follows Mary and Joseph living in an inner city urban area. Fearing the repercussions of the pandemic they decide to run away to the countryside, rather than the usual trek across the desert.
It also features cameo appearances from the local community, including Wordsworth Trust, and the Langdale Ambleside Mountain Rescue Team.
“It has been really quite cathartic for [the pupils], because it’s given them an opportunity to talk through how everybody’s behaved during lockdown,” Goode said.
The film will be broadcast to local hospitals within the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay on Christmas Eve. “It was lovely because it sort of became the Christmas story itself. Our plan was to make a little thing for our community, and the community ended up thoroughly involving themselves in it.”
Other schools have taken a different approach to their nativity. Pupils at Glascote Academy, in Tamworth, Staffordshire, have learned sign language to Christmas songs to accompany their Christmas play.
The government guidance says that kids can sing in classrooms, but only if they’re very well ventilated and if the kids are a metre apart, says Charlotte Anderson, a music teacher at the school. “I can’t think of a school in the country where they can sit like that. Classrooms are tiny, aren’t they?”
Anderson appointed every class their own sign language song to learn, and the classes recorded the songs together with others in their respective year bubble in the school hall.
“They’ve enjoyed learning the sign language for the songs,” Anderson said. “It’s something that will stick with them for a long time because they’ve had to practise it so much. But they would definitely much prefer a normal Christmas play.
“It is a shame, especially for my year six group. It’s their last Christmas in the school. They’re gutted because they would perform the big parts in the Christmas productions, but this is the best we can do.”
Like many schools across the UK, Bramley Park academy, in Leeds, has had to adapt to using virtual technology to help record its nativity. Carrie Green, executive principal of the school, said they used Google classrooms for “a different twist on the virtual nativity, just to make sure they’re all still involved.”
The script has been adapted, too. “Angel Gabriel has a Zoom call with Mary to tell her that she’s expecting the baby Jesus. The shepherds have been furloughed. Mary and Joseph have to scan a QR code when they arrive at the inn, and the kings take hand sanitiser and a golden face mask to the baby Jesus.”
Green reflected that she found singing into her laptop while the children joined in around the school to be “one of the weirdest thing I’ve ever done in my life”.
But, she added, “the kids have absolutely loved it. This is a really special time of year, and it’s so important that we’re still doing this”.
• This article was amended on 11 December 2020 to clarify that Bramley Park academy is in Leeds, not Bradford.
