I remember when I was a child in elementary school and we had to do a holiday or Christmas show for the parents every year. The teachers made you dress up in bright costumes and dance and sing about the holidays while your parents watched on from the shadows of the crowd, all cooing and laughing over the group of young children prancing about on the stage in front of them. Usually our holiday shows involved Santa Clause, reindeer, and other well known holiday themes. We never really deviated from the norm. One elementary school decided to do something a little different for the holiday show this year, and brought along some other, more buggy characters to help them.
The young students at École John Wilson Elementary School also try to bring out the holiday cheer every year with their own holiday performance. This year, however, instead of sticking to the traditional themes, they decided to use bugs, or rather bugz, to bring magic to the season. Students from grades 1 through 4 performed A Bugz Christmas, a musical originally composed by John Jacobson and John Higgins, and adapted for the students by their Grade 4 music teacher Jill Cummins.
This musical begins its tale with the premise of a kind of playful infestation of bugs. The musical opens with the carpenter bees building the sets and silkworms making the costumes for a fun holiday celebration. However, when the termites eat the Christmas tree decorations and lights, leaving the tree dark and bare, a crisis unfolds. The bugs are sad because they won’t have any lights on their tree until the fireflies come to light the tree and save the day. Despite their bad behavior, even the termites are included in the celebration, as the little bugs decide that everyone should get to celebrate the holidays. Thus, our little tale of bugs ends happily ever after.
Each class had to decorate their own lines and songs, and each student decorated a bug ornament that was used in the show. The lucky students from Grade 4 got the honor of picking acting parts from a hat, which would be either a termite, bumblebee or butterfly. This different style of Christmas show was refreshing and explored outside the traditional themes for shows for the season, while still having a meaningful and joyful holiday message.
What was the most interesting and fun holiday show that you or your child/children performed while in school?