It is the Christmas gift no one should turn down.
Follow the Star is returning to Inverness this Christmas season with new faces and new scenes for the production.
For the fifth consecutive year, Inverness Baptist Church, Beulah Baptist Church, All Saints Episcopal Church, and Inverness United Methodist Church are putting on the program that has become both a Christmas tradition in the small town and a gift to all who come to see it.
The event will take place Saturday and Sunday nights (Dec. 1-2) from 5-8 p.m., starting at First Baptist Church of Inverness.
According to organizers, planning and prep work for the event began this summer and has intensified over the past couple of months.
The idea for the production was brought to Inverness by Lanny Kennedy by way of her friend Lynn Gordon, who once lived in Inverness but now resides in North Carolina.
They had the idea of getting all the churches to do it together. There are around 125 people in the community who help with the production.
Those include the actors, cooks, and servers and those who come and work on sets, costumes, drive buses, hold flashlights, help people on the steps/on and off buses, put the outside stars up at every church, put the lights on the road and in the trees, take the posters around, order the t-shirts, fix food for the actors, the police who keep the roads blocked and safe and many more.
The crew did a dress rehearsal this past Sunday and continue to do walk-through performances during the week.
There will be three new scenes in this year’s production, with two familiar scenes that involve Herod and the Three Wise Men returning for another year.
Groups of about 40 at a time will converge on First Baptist Church first, then move by bus to All Saints Episcopal Church.
With the help of a tour guide, carrying a staff with a star on top, the groups will assemble in the church sanctuary for a scene from the Christmas story.
The group will then move to First United Methodist Church of Inverness for two scenes before moving to the living nativity scene.
Groups will be given the opportunity to take Communion and each person will receive a Christmas ornament as they are leaving.
This year’s ornament is dedicated to the memory of Sandy Steele.
