The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

The Herdmans’ cat is an animal representation of the siblings: “It had one short leg and a broken tail and one missing eye, and the mailman wouldn’t deliver anything to the Herdmans because of it” (4). It is a mean, feral, fearsome animal that the mailman avoids, and there are rumors that it is a bobcat the Herdmans captured just to make it wilder. There is no explanation for why the cat has such severe and numerous physical defects, but it is like another family member. Although the passages describing the cat are humorous, the symbolism is poignant. The Herdmans’ initial reaction to others—just like the cat—is to lash out and attack before it can be attacked. The cat also raises tension as a metaphor for the Herdmans’ unpredictability. When Claude brings the cat for “Show and Tell,” it destroys the room, eats the class fish, and eats two mice that belonged to another student. The cat is barely manageable and attacks “anything it [can] see out of its one eye” (6). Every kid who expects them to turn the pageant into a disaster is picturing a scenario as fantastic and chaotic as the “Show and Tell.”