TOWN OF MANLIUS –  First Baptist Church of Manlius held a Christmas concert with its young ones on Dec. 20 and followed it with a book reading applicable to the approaching holiday.
For the concert in the sanctuary of the Pleasant Street church, the participating children dressed in their best Christmas attire as they sang a mix of religious, culturally festive, and wintry favorites, from “Silent Night” and “This Little Light of Mine” to “Jingle Bells” and “Snowflakes Dancing.” The group of preschool singers has also been practicing “God Made Me,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”
After doing twirls and dances in the chapel as they waited to make their processional entrance onto the steps of the altar, some of the children held onto battery-operated candles, snowflake props and ringing bells while they sang the various songs of the season.
Melissa Mapstone, who is in her first year as director of the outreach ministry Playschool Preschool, said her kids did a “beautiful job” as concert performers, adding that the event is a “wonderful and fun experience” that had a number of moving parts.
Though a couple of the songs were more recent additions to the evening’s setlist, several had been rehearsed by the kids here and there since September.
Nikki Visioni, known to the children as “Miss Nikki,” was in charge of teaching the group music and she helped the little ones break out of their shells, allowing them to feel safe making mistakes instead of getting everything just right while still having them polish their vocal skills for when they’d go onstage.
Lisa Papa, another teacher at the preschool, said the children picked up on the words to the songs quickly and worked as hard as they could to prepare for the concert.
Though local author Jennifer Catney had been scheduled to give a reading of her children’s picture book “Filling the Manger” after the performance, she came down with an illness and could not attend.
In her place, the pastor of First Baptist Church of Manlius, John Buskey, sat atop a straw bale placed on the altar and read the book aloud to the families gathered.
The church’s preschool weaved the book into its curriculum all month long by sharing its message of generosity with the kids.
Written and illustrated by Catney, the pages of “Filling the Manger” tell of the tradition taught to her by her mother of taking pieces of straw from a jar and laying them in a small replica manger as bedding, representing the welcoming of the baby Jesus.
In their family, each piece of straw put in the manger stood for one act of kindness witnessed either inside or outside of the household—a practice the preschool decided to take on at the start of December to encourage good deeds among the children.
“On that note, we turned it into a school-wide event and the teachers used yellow construction paper for the straw,” Mapstone said. “Any time we saw the children do anything kind, the teachers would jot down on the slips of paper what it was the child had done.”
Mapstone’s husband, Peter, even built a miniature wooden manger to keep in the school information area in the center of the school.
By the time of the Dec. 20 concert, that manger was filled up high with examples of different acts of kindness shown, such as unasked-for help given to the teachers, scooting to the side to make room at the sink so another child could wash their hands, encouraging a fellow classmate that she could do what she set her mind to, and patiently waiting one’s turn.
“We’re a preschool, so it’s the little things, and honestly isn’t that what it is in life really?” Mapstone said. “We started with nothing, and now it’s overflowing. We serve a God of abundance, so it was just a beautiful month here at Playschool Preschool where we just really opened our hearts and shared with others and built up our school community.”
Now in its 27th year, Playschool Preschool has 28 registered students currently, all in the age range of three to five.
Other community events the school held during the fall include a craft night this past November, a Trunk-or-Treat in the parking lot just before Halloween, and a parents’ afternoon out earlier in December that let them drop off their kids at the church for a showing of the movie “The Star” while they took care of things they needed to catch up on like holiday shopping and present wrapping.
“We aim to be family-oriented and community-oriented and just reach out to people and say come on in,” Mapstone said.
After the preschool children sang carols on Dec. 20, the attendees congregated in the building’s gym for fruit punch, cookies and veggies as the kids ran around and played games. There were also signed copies of Catney’s book set out on a side table.
There are plans to have a make-up reading day at a later date when Catney can possibly stop into the Playschool classroom herself and answer questions from the kids.