Christmas Carols

This is a story about making contact, and it going really well.

One hardship for my sister Julie is never getting enough Christmas music of the right kind. She has gone to many shows and come back disappointed with the selections. Even at church, her favorite Christmas hymns often get passed over, while we just keep singing Silent Night over and over again.

When I saw that our stake was having a singalong evening, I thought this might be the answer. To my surprise, my sisters agreed.

I also felt that I should invite two friends we had not seen in a while, Tricia and Cathy. We did not hear back from Tricia, but Cathy thought it sounded like fun, and agreed to meet us there.

The evening itself went pretty well. We sang hymns, carols, some really old carols, and then we finished on the Hallelujah Chorus (probably the weakest part of the evening--it may require a little more working up to it). All four of us enjoyed it, and then after the singing was over we stayed chatting for quite a bit. If it had just ended up being a pleasant evening, that would have been good enough in itself.

It was more than that, though. First of all we realized we missed each other, so we arranged to get together again. That was fun--but wait--there's more!

Cathy is very talented musically, unlike us, and Julie and Maria asked if she could give us voice lessons. It was not supposed to be any huge undertaking, which was fine, because teaching voice is not her specialty, but she thought she could give us about four weeks of instruction, and that would be about right.

Well, I'd be lying if I said that there were not weeks when we talked more than we sang, but nonetheless we did learn some stuff musically, and we had fun. We went over meter, and and how to lead music, and did lots of practice, focusing on Pink's song "Perfect". We have some things we can work on to become stronger vocally, but I can tell that they seem more confident singing. (For just singing hymns in church I was already pretty confident anyway.

What's more, Cathy is going to start knitting lessons. I can't swear that our lesson-taking, getting-out-there-and-doing-stuff selves are the inspiration, but it's still cool.

Good stuff.

July Ensign
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