Loonfoot Falls Elementary Christmas Program

Loonfoot Falls' elementary school put on their annual Christmas program last Thursday. The parking lots were full, twenty minutes before the show started. Well, almost full. I found a place within a hundred yards of the nearest door.

It might have been closer than that. Distances expand when it's dark, cold, and windy.

I sat next to a family with two pre-schoolers. Since the audience was mostly the immediate families of the elementary-school kids, the crowd was about evenly divided between adults, teenagers, and kids from a few weeks to about six years.

My hat's off to the parents: there were only a couple of babies who had to be carried out. That's not to say that the kids stayed still through all one hour and fifteen minutes of the program.

A large gap between the main auditorium and two sets of built-in bleacher seating makes a dandy playground. One family, sitting next to the open floor, had two kids, one a bit over three feet tall, the other a little shorter.

About a half-hour into the performance, the shorter one toddled about two-thirds of the way across the open floor, and stopped when he had a good view down an aisle. The taller one followed, but started running in circles when the kids on stage started singing something lively.

Both of them were enjoying the music, I think. And their parents, apart from intercepting them when they got more than about twenty feet away, let the kids be kids.