We hold special festival services four times a year: on Easter Sunday, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day. These services include holiday music and a single talk intended for the whole family.
Holiday services also include some sort of special celebratory activity. For example, during the Easter service everyone is invited to bring flowers to the front of the church. The flowers are subsequently donated to a women's shelter.
Pageants
We also have two pageants that we do every year, in place of a regular church service. One is a Christmas pageant, celebrating the story of the Lord's birth. This pageant is performed on one of the Sundays leading up to Christmas. The other is a "New Church Day" pageant, featuring stories from the book of Revelation. New Church Day is our celebration of the founding of our church. This pageant is done on the Sunday closest to the nineteenth of June.
The actors in these pageants are volunteers from the Olivet community (and volunteering to help out with a pageant is a particularly fun way to get involved in the life of the church). There's something surprisingly powerful about seeing the stories of the Lord's Word illustrated by living people, and these pageants are usually some of the highlights of Olivet's year.
This scene from the Christmas pageant shows the magi bowing down before the baby Lord.
In this scene from the New Church Day pageant, the actors illustrate a range of different attitudes towards God.