PASADENA HILLS • Faced with the most paralyzing snow and ice storm in years — not to mention six homebound children and a mess of neighbor kids, each with a serious case of cabin fever — parents Jerry and Marie Carter hatched a plan to save their sanity.

"Go make a show! Put on a performance!" the couple directed the young Carters and their buddies on Christmas Eve 1973.

What they hoped would keep the kids distracted for a few hours, though, has kept them engaged for nearly 40 years.

A tradition was born on that cold, snowy night at the Carters' busy brick home in north St. Louis County — an annual play that not only has entertained relatives and neighbors every Christmas Eve but also has helped dozens of the area's poor and suffering.

"The tradition has been firmly embedded in our Christmas celebration," said Kathleen Carter-Groppe, one of the Carters' six grown children.

Without it, said Marie Carter, the family "wouldn't know what to do."

It all started with a dreadful storm just days before Christmas that year.

Snow and ice and below-zero temperature crippled the St. Louis area, closing schools, canceling flights and shuttering venues typically immune to dicey weather, including the Arch. For days, the city seemed to be at a standstill.

"Nobody could go anywhere," recalled Marie Carter, 73. "Our house was the house where everybody went."

A house full of kids and their pals, and all the noise inherent in such a brew, prompted a call for a production of sorts on Christmas Eve.

"We were all getting on everybody's nerves," recalled Karen Carter, 51, of St. Louis. "My parents were like, 'Oh my God, go down and practice a show, give us a show, we need a show.' And really, it was my mom just saying, 'Get busy, go do something, stay out of our hair.' So we put on a show in the upstairs hallway."

It wasn't what any Carter would describe as Tony Award worthy. Rather, it was an opportunity for one of the Carter girls to offer an encore presentation of a speech for which she'd won a ribbon — and for the rest of the brood and their friends to try to upstage her.

At showtime, an audience representing a half-dozen neighborhood families — "whoever couldn't get out of Pasadena," quipped Karen Carter — took their seats in the living room.

"And when we'd turn off the hallway light and then turn it back on, that was our stage," Karen Carter said.

The kids had so much fun, they decided to patch together another performance the next Christmas Eve. But that time, Marie Carter suggested the cast collect admission — canned goods for the needy.

With that, a tradition not only took the shape of an annual performance, but an annual mission.

MORE THAN A PLAY

Though there is debate over the official number of performances produced by the "Christmas Players," the Carter family and friends have put on a show every year since 1973, making this year's effort the 39th. (Regardless, Karen Carter said, she will not change a string of theater lights currently configured as a "37").

The show has gone on despite the fact all Carter siblings but one (Kay) have retired from the stage. Jerry and Marie Carter's grandchildren and some extended family have eagerly carried on the tradition.

Karen Carter now helps keep the actors focused at rehearsals, while the family's longtime playwright, Kathleen Carter-Groppe, 48, directs.

The play might have gone the way of most things 1970s were it not for the collection of canned goods for the needy, which in time transformed into the collection of money.

The Christmas Players have asked for donations as admission and spent the proceeds on families they've learned of through the Post-Dispatch's 100 Neediest Cases, Special School District's Project Hope, the crisis-care program Youth Emergency Service and other organizations.

"That is one of the main reasons why we've kept it going," said Kathleen Carter-Groppe of Columbia, Ill., whose three children will appear in this year's production. "We wouldn't do it any other way."

At one time, a collection upwards of $150 was a huge deal. But as the tradition has matured, the contributions have grown. Karen Carter said the plays now bring in $800 to $1,200 a year. And some years, the cast has even put on two shows to meet the demand (the basement seats 25 to 30, with overflow and staircase-wary theatergoers seated upstairs for live broadcasts over the TV).

The Christmas Players this year are raising money to help a cancer-stricken single mother and her four children the Carters learned of through C.J.'s Journey, a group that helps young adults affected by cancer.

It's not enough to pass the hat, though. The tradition involves getting a list of needs and wants from a family, shopping for them and then wrapping the gifts.

This year, Karen Carter said, it became important to the grandkids to buy a "really cool, long wool coat with a fur-lined hood" for the woman with cancer because she moved to St. Louis from a warm-weather climate and her treatments caused her to lose her hair. The woman had only asked for gifts for her children.

THE WHOLE NINE YARDS

The Christmas Players left their upstairs hallway 'stage" long ago for the roomier, more theatrically pliable basement.

"We upgraded to curtains with a string," Karen said. "It was really a big deal."

Jerry Carter, 73, routinely helps build sets and props, including a collapsible 6-by-6-foot boxing ring for this year's play.

"One year they had me building a room down there for the stage with windows and drywall — the whole nine yards," he said.

Relatives and friends paint backdrops on cardboard refrigerator boxes, make costumes and operate lights and microphones to help bring the 30- to 40-minute productions to life.

Santa Claus plays a role as well, making an appearance to bring the children at the play presents. The kids aren't the only ones on the receiving end, however. No one leaves a show without a new pair of socks, typically the more affordable variety packaged in bags of 10.

"Tube socks back in the day, and then it became the short-cut socks," Karen Carter said. "Seriously."

The plays themselves don't reflect the seriousness of their purpose. As the chief playwright for more than three decades, Kathleen Carter has spun spoof after spoof, often with themes that poke at pop culture but still laced with references to Christmas.

There was a Carter version of "Mission Impossible," with grandkids hoisted to the ceiling like stunt men. And a parody of the Academy Awards, in which the cast wore prom dresses and delivered acceptance speeches after film clips of past Carter plays were shown on a big-screen TV borrowed from a Rent-a-Center.

And "Christmas Under the Big Top," which featured a granddaughter being fired out of a cannon.

"Well ... not really," Karen Carter explained. "But we stuffed a doll to look like one of the nieces, and we pulled it across the stage. It was hysterical."

One year a family friend who resembles Oprah put on a wig, then put on a show.

"She was Oprah, the big O," said Karen Carter. "She gave out socks — that was her 'favorite thing.' Everybody looked under their chairs for socks."

KEEPING THE TRADITION

This year, the play — co-written by Kathleen Carter-Groppe's daughter Samm Groppe, 12, a seventh-grader at Immaculate Conception School in Columbia — is "The Epic Battle for Christmas: Barbie versus Bratz."

It features the older Carter grandkids, as sage, seasoned Barbies, in a Black Friday showdown with the younger grandkids, as sassy, brassy Bratz dolls.

At a recent rehearsal, 13 female Christmas Players, all on stage at once, practiced their lines and worked out kinks in the choreography.

Inches away, sawhorses and plywood rested where the audience would sit. Folding chairs leaned against poured-concrete walls. Laundry hung on a clothesline, and power tools sat quietly on Jerry's work tables.

"Wait for the audience," Carter-Groppe directed, encouraging the cast to pause after delivering lines. "Hopefully, they're going to crack up laughing."

She detailed use of a prop to one of her daughters. "You'll put the steak on her eye," Carter-Groppe explained.

"Is it a real steak?" asked a small voice, stage left.

One actor had to leave — basketball practice.

Another yawned — it was nearing bedtime.

The cousins paid attention but couldn't resist yukking it up here and there.

"Back on your spots!" bellowed Karen Carter. "Focus!"

The Christmas Players don't mind. They relish the tradition and the good it does.

"We're really grateful for all the presents that we get, so it's just really good to be able to do that for other kids," said Claire Dieckmann, 16, a sophomore at Incarnate Word Academy in Bel-Nor.

"We like to help," added Anais Duboeuf, 13, an eighth-grader at Francis Howell Middle School in Weldon Spring.

By all accounts, the younger generation wants to keep the tradition going.

"We all have a really fun time with it, and we do it with family," said Lydia Dieckmann, 10, a fourth-grader at St. Ann Catholic School in Normandy.

"If my kids don't want to be in it," said Shannon Krekeler, 12, a seventh-grader at St. Joseph in Cottleville, "I'll force them to."

Hectic schedules, creative differences and general mayhem have, on occasion, prompted the Carters to question whether they should continue the tradition.

During a chaotic rehearsal Sunday, someone suggested that maybe this should be the last year for the play.

But one of the children asked what would happen to the families in need if they didn't have the play.

Everyone sat for a moment, not saying a word, looking at one another.

Then everyone stood and agreed to take it from the top.