The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

The Herdman children appeared in two other books: The Best Halloween Ever and The Best School Year Ever. While each of the wildly popular books in the series contains moral lessons and social commentary, the Herdman children’s antics make the stories so irresistible.

The Herdmans are hard-luck children without ambition or plans, but they are charming in their own way. Robinson’s portrayal of the Herdmans is similar to Roald Dahl’s depictions of other terrible children. Dahl also shared Robinson’s tendency to mock most of the adults in his stories. Dahl understood that children may be innocent, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be cruel, petty, and manipulative, often with hilarious results. The Herdmans’ love of pranks and one-upmanship would be right at home if they were the children of the characters in Dahl’s The Twits. They would also fit neatly into the grotesque group of children who tour Willy Wonka’s factory in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Most of their behavior is at odds with the upstanding, if equally unlucky, siblings of beloved classics like Gertrude Warner’s The Boxcar Children and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s sisters in the Little House on the Prairie series. The Herdmans are not merely aggressive, exasperating, hilarious, and unruly, but they are also creative.