Christmas pageant.

Yesterday I went to my friend's little nephew's Christmas pageant at his daycare along with his grandma and his sister. The procession in was chaotic; all the kids held battery-operated candles, but would bolt from line to go hug their parents, or stop and wave to them and hold up everyone behind them. For one song they sang the daycare workers stuck floppy fabric antlers and flashing red noses on them; for another, "The Twelve Days of Daycare," they came in one by one and held up signs with something for each day of daycare (one cubbyhole, two snacks, etc.), and my friend's little nephew held up his sign, "seven superheroes", but he turned it around and was looking at the picture of the superheroes for the rest of the song and so no one in the audience really saw the sign. For the manger scene that close out the pageant, they dressed my friend's little nephew up as a shepherd with a brown robe and a brown piece of cloth tied around his head and a shepherd crook, and three little blonde girls were dressed as sheep in these costumes with cotton balls fluffed out around them. After they processed in and someone was reading a version of the nativity story, my friend's little nephew, who's like three or four, started turning to the little girls, stamping his crook on the ground, and being like, "Say 'BAA!'", or, "Lie down!", with the girls standing around and one or two of them occasionally saying "Baa."

After the pageant, there was cookies and punch in the daycare kitchen -- sugar cookies with green frosting and sprinkles or brown frosting and embedded M&Ms; the punch was something red, with rainbow sherbet tossed in to make it fizz -- and this one girl who worked at the daycare whose husband used to work with my brother and whose younger brother graduated with me from high school, only from the public school in town, showed me some Christmas pictures of her sons that she had taken that day, and started telling me about how her brother who I know is now a paramedic for some private ambulance company in Detroit. I guess a lot of times when they bring people out on stretchers people go alongside and try to get in the pockets to see if they have drugs with them, and just yesterday when they were putting a guy with a gunshot wound in the throat in the ambulance, a guy walked up to the stretcher with a pistol and finished the job right there, and the paramedics just stepped aside since they're not allowed to carry.

They also had bowls of chocolates out in the kitchen, too.