The ghosts of Christmas Past

It's a strange phenomenon, the power of Christmas Eve to resurrect memories so strongly and yet so randomly. As I listened to the first of the closing voluntaries from the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's, there came into my mind a memory of myself, in my late teens, stricken with some inconvenient malady on Christmas Eve and spending that short afternoon in bed with the radio on, drifting in and out of sleep. I can't remember what ailed me, and cannot think it lasted, but at the time it felt unreal and solitary as the day darkened.

The small me in the photo (I think I was two) lived in blue dungarees and had to be coaxed out of them for family Christmas tea. (The yellow duck didn't join us - his red felt beak was too chewed for respectable company). We ate Christmas lunch, I remember clearly, in our top flat in Novar Drive, Hyndland, and went for tea to my grandparents' house in Hyndland Road. The whole extended family - the Stewarts, that is - would turn up there at some point in the day, though as I was the first of my generation I was the sole child for the first few post-war years. Families tended to live close, and there was public transport for those who were beyond walking distance.

I was remembering this morning how in my early married life I didn't do any Christmas food: my parents' house was ten minutes' walk from our flat (still in Hyndland) and we went there for lunch and stayed, stupefied, until it was time for bed. My first ever Christmas cake was made just before I had my first child - I'm sure I've recounted how, having slipped on ice in Clarence Drive, I had such a sore behind that I couldn't sit down, and dispelled my fears by baking. But the Glasgow Christmasses didn't end with our emigration to Dunoon; Cal Mac ferries seem to me to have run on Christmas Day and we headed back to Glasgow with our baby son. I do recall, however, that on the first year in Dunoon I iced the cake just before heading out to Midnight Mass: for the first time in my life I was attached to a church and had singing to do.

The long years of running Christmas myself occupied the greatest part of my life, having ended only five or six years ago. It still seems odd not to be making stuffing on Christmas Eve, and ramming it into a recalcitrant bird before church, odd not to waken to the smell of cooking and worry that the overnight temperature had been too high - or too low if the smell wasn't making it as far as the bedroom. There are no small children for whom stockings will have to be filled. I no longer have the restless wait for all the grown-up family to be safely here, nor the unholy rush between the end of term and the 25th. There is, theoretically, all the time in the world.

Time, in fact, to miss family; to look forward to seeing some and regret not seeing others; to have a suitcase packed and worry about taking the right things or forgetting presents or cooking brandy. Time to think about having dinner so that we can have a proper rest before our midnight sing/play/pray (have I got the intercessions? the music?) Time to wonder how we ever had the energy to drag sleeping choristers from their beds to come with us (really).

Now these choristers are cooking turkeys, looking after young children, preparing for visitors, in different parts of the country, and we are here, with the dark firth calm at last and the rain peppering the windows. Everything changes but the message of that distant birth. Even the carols - tonight our introit will be Advent Song, which is only four years old. And then Advent will be over, the waiting over.

And it will be Christmas.

Advent: waiting in the moment

Advent again. And every year, a little more suddenly than the preceding year, the same ritual tasks - that moment when you realise that it's time to forage in the forest (and we won't tell where) for just the right selection of greenery, from the delicate lace branches that droop below the candle wreath to the wonderful pink berries from the church grounds that were obviously designed by the Creator to complement the liturgical colours, the chilly morning in the empty church when fingers fumble with the secateurs and drop spiny leaves on the carpet. This year we added the cool scent of eucalyptus to the wreath for the pleasure of doing so, and the finished article was more ebulliently leafy than any of its predecessors. We wonder if anywhere else does it quite like this ... but we doubt it.*

Shortly after that I made my Christmas cake, thinking, as always, of the first time I did this, heavily pregnant and extremely sore after sitting down on black ice while shopping and deciding that I'd be happier standing, baking, than sitting and worrying. Stir up Sunday may no longer have its own collect - Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people ...  - but that's the day the fruit goes in the sherry, or the sherry in the fruit, and a week later the cake is made and drizzled with the left-over liquor. Later I shall turn my mind to puddings, brandy butter, cranberry sauce ...

And then there will be cards to think of. Is it inane still to send cards when I could greet so many people through Facebook and Twitter? Was it always daft to give them to friends we see all the time, or to the family we shall spend Christmas with? But I remember how I used to love writing the few cards I sent as a child, loved receiving them - and there's a part of me can't bear to give this up. I have dealt with presents for the grandchildren, and refuse to panic about their parents, let alone anyone else - present-giving should be a joy, not a worry.

Tonight, however, I shall be doing what I most enjoy: singing the music of the season, rehearsing carols for Christmas. And on Sunday I'm expecting to participate in a wonderful, quiet, dark, candle-lit Evensong, at which Mr B and I will sing with two friends, singing the music of the waiting and the longing that is Advent, repeating the glorious setting of my own words that is the Advent Song we premiered last year and which is now obviously reaching so many people on YouTube. I listen to it, and the wonder returns; I know that singing it will take me to a place that nothing else can.

Of all the seasons, this is the one to restore the mystery and awake the longing that can too often be submerged in the busyness of life - even church life. It's good to take time to wait in the moment.

*For the sharp-eyed and critical, I can report that by the time Advent Sunday came, the altar frontal was purple - a faded, pinky-purple, but definitely not red. Just saying ...

A fold in time

Really far too tired to blog this, but the moment will pass otherwise... Today's concert, Words & Music for Christmas, was an old formula that we devised some 25 years ago for the choir we had started when we came to Dunoon. The Hesperians was a mixed voice choir, about 15 voices strong, and when we began our Christmas events, always on the third Sunday in Advent, we packed the venue, with people up in the balcony that even then we suspected as being precarious. In 1996 we gave our final such concert and the choir ceased to exist, having run out of tenors.

This year the choir that is really the child of the Hesperians revived the format, and, in a folding of time, that was what we were involved in this afternoon. 8+1 is a female voice group - 8 women, 1 man (Mr B, the MD) - and for today we were augmented by a second bass to sing SATB pieces. The second altos have developed into convincing tenors, and the sound was magical in places; we also sang several pieces arranged for female voices. We actually achieved a sufficiently high standard to put a smile on Mr B's face - not a rueful grimace in sight today!

But the audience reflected the fact that there are so many more carol events in Dunoon these days. Gone the time when we were the only show of this type in town - and gone the children, our children, sitting solemnly in the front row with their grandparents, also long gone. We are the grandparents now - and our grandchildren are far away and probably don't realise that their grandparents don't know their place and are still up there performing. I kept looking up expecting to see feet swinging at the ends of legs too short to reach the floor, and seeing only a sea of grey heads.

But the adrenaline of performance still works its rejuvenating magic, even if we collapse in exhaustion afterwards, and the particular thrill of hearing our own work - Mr B's arrangements; a couple of my poems - performed in public is not easily beaten. The hall may be on the verge of demolition, the balcony long out of bounds because of rot; the choristers may suddenly have become 13 years older without really noticing - but today we performed our socks off, and showed how it can be done.

And if you've never heard The Christ Child's Lullaby arranged for solo voices (Gaelic and English), four part choir, piano and solo cello - you've missed yourself. 'Nuff said.

Randomly festive thoughts

Still beset by various carolling earworms, it came to me that I should try to find out what Christmas carol would be the desert island choice of the blethers readership. If you're still reading other people's blogs rather than trying to get your cards sent or your pressies wrapped, please tell.

On a tenuously related tack, I am happy to announce that my 38-year-old fairy lights (Pifco, little coloured bells, no flashing) lit up beautifully in their box today when we got them down from the loft. I thought a test advisable before Woolworths empties its shelves altogether. Spare bulbs are no longer sold, and I've used the last of the batch I bought maybe ten years ago. The lights are probably wildly unsafe and meet no modern criteria, but I like to hope they will see me out (not in a lethal way, you understand)

And finally, by way of greeting and to waste even more of your precious time, a festive link for you all.

Earworms and emotion

This is the season when all good choristers tend to go around singing snippets of carols – evidence of the earworms with which they are afflicted. Sometimes the words are obviously misremembered, random juxtaposing of mismatched lines, tum-ti-tums with mangers and oxen, la-lahs with virgins and angels. I have just returned from Somerfields, where I startled an elderly man over the 3 for the price of 2 cheeses by singing “here’s no ox about thy bed” quite audibly but unprepared by any preliminary humming. He moved swiftly off, without any cheese.

But I’m interested in the sudden surge of emotion which afflicts me these days as I sing. Partly, of course, it’s the new grandson: too many carols have me seeing his face and feeling him warm in my arms. But I have a feeling that it’s also being older. Rather than the detached coolness with which I used to sing – not only carols, but at the funerals of friends – I find myself on the verge of cracking inconveniently as I sing “hush my darling” in the new arrangement of Watts’ Cradle Song (by Mr B – glorious). It is especially inconvenient as I’m singing the melody with one other alto – everyone else is singing Oooooo - and if I do crack up, it’ll be horribly noticeable.

So: task of the week. Sing tenderly and beautifully, but don’t listen to the words. And don’t, please don’t, think of grandchildren.

Some gig!

Second half
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

We've been off gadding, Mr B and I - to London, just before Christmas. Normally we wouldn't choose precisely this time for such a trip, but on Saturday evening an arrangement by Mr B of The Christ Child's Lullaby was being given an airing at one of the huge "come and join in" carol events sponsored by Raymond Gubbay and we felt it was too much to miss. A carol which was first sung in Dunoon by the late lamented Hesperians, re-emerged in Cumbrae at a carol service years later and caught the ear of Jonathan Cohen now appeared in an enlarged and revamped version sung by a large, miked-up group of theatre singers - in front of an audience of some 5, 000 in a packed Albert Hall.

What an evening! The atmosphere was terrific, the performances polished and glitzy. We joined in the singing and the Mexican waves - though it has to be said the latter grew somewhat tedious - and I was fascinated by the odd acoustics of the hall which made it feel as if I was the only person singing. Apparently this affects the performers too - one end of the choir unable to hear the other - and I was very aware of the huge size of the auditorium. But the evening was simply the greatest fun, with great waves of bonhomie all round. And it was nothing like anything I've ever experienced live before.

The journey home yesterday was long - our train north as well as the Gourock train seemed to stop at every lamppost - and ended with the bumpy last Cal Mac ferry and the unglamorous trail up Ferry Brae, dragging our cases up the hill in the teeth of the rising wind. We knew we were well and truly home when the rain began shortly after we got in. After the atmospherically chilly fog of London, it came as quite a rude reminder.

And now I'm off to sing with a crowd of maybe 40, if we're lucky - but I wouldn't miss our own brand of Christmas for anything. Not even the Albert Hall.

Advent

Flashless
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

I rather like this picture, taken as the male voices of the ad hoc choir for Cumbrae's Advent Carols rehearsed and I wandered about listening to them and experimenting with my camera. It conveys some of the feelings I have about Advent - the darkness, the pools of light, the afternoon already dimming in the short December day. I was powerfully reminded of my first experiences of the Episcopal Church, here in this place in the late 1960s, as we sang "Let all mortal flesh keep silence", one of my favourite hymns and one which I had never heard before coming to Cumbrae. Music, darkness, light: all powerful stimuli to memory - and to something else, something at the very heart of Advent.

I shall be posting a new poem for Advent in two blogs: frankenstina and love blooms bright, where there are already two lovely Advent posts. Do visit!

Christmas medley, anyone?

Just back from a visit to Edinburgh - a heady mix of a stay with dear friends, a meeting of the Lay Learning committee of the SEC and a visit to the German Christmas Market in Princes Street Gardens, where I took this rather low-quality pic on my phone. I would have had my camera had it not been for the horizontal rain on a snell wind as we left the car; actually we had a sufficiently long splash of dry to glug down a mug of scalding gluwein at the market stall and feel suddenly much cosier. We were not, however, tempted by the big wheel - it looked decidedly shoogly to me, and a sure ringer for a bout of hypothermia.

And the Lay Learning? I have much to debrief on this one, but came away thinking about the balance between content and delivery systems in any sphere of learning. There's a debate into which I stuck a toe over on John Connell's blog which threw me into reflecting further on this; the tension between knowledge and the communicating of same is complicated by the problem of having to engage with an audience which, unlike school pupils, can turn away and demonstrate only indifference - even harder to deal with than hostility. And the problem of sentences like that last one is that one loses the will to live ploughing through them - could do better, Blethers!

On a lighter note, a thought about Christmas carols. As we skelped home through the incipient floods on the M8 we listened to a sampler CD of new carols. After one particularly ebullient offering, we were struck by a mental image of the Christ-child, square-faced and open-mouthed, wailing inaudibly as the heavenly hosts gave it laldy over the manger. Makes you realise how very good are some of the by now classic arrangements - a case of content not matching delivery systems in many of the new ones.

We made it home in tempest, storm and wind - another quote for the carolophile!

Celebrating Advent

Today was the Second Sunday in Advent. It rained, relentlessly. The borders in our garden were flooded and we had to wade through a massive puddle to reach the car. The wind blew ominously, making us fear for the ferries again. And yet, among all this wildness, we have had the most wonderful day.

For the first time in many years, we had a proper Advent Carol Service in Holy Trinity Church, Dunoon. I was one of a group of singers drawn from our church and St Paul's, Rothesay, a group small enough and expert enough to make great sounds together and goodness, we enjoyed the experience. Our visiting singers weren't deterred or stranded by the weather, and were followed by a group of parishioners from Rothesay, so that even on a day like this there was a congregation of 50 in the candlelit gloom. The water poured into the vestry and the back of the nave; buckets slithered on the wet floor; the draughts swept down from the tower and into the choir - but there were candles everywhere, the silences were full of the anticipation of the season, and the atmosphere was electric.

We are so blessed in the circumstances which have brought together Kimberly our new rector, Martin our singing bishop, some great readers and this wee choir - to say nothing of our organist, about whom I say less than most because he is also Mr Blethers. Our church may look scabby and leak horrendously; it may be stuck up a hill in the woods; we may have no money to do more than keep the heating on for an extra day to stave off hypothermia. But the inner fire is there, the spirit is alive, and I wouldn't have it otherwise for the world.

And our Rector makes fabby mulled wine!

Ben Gunn without the cheese

Well, that was quite a weekend! This photo of The Cathedral of The Isles, taken during Friday's lull in the frightful weather, gives no notion of the rattling slates, creaking roof timbers, guttering candles and flooded coastal roads that were to follow, nor of the fact that we would be stranded on Cumbrae by the storm and feel that by Sunday we were escaping by the skin of our teeth as we bumped across on the recently-restored Cumbrae ferry link which had been off earlier in the day. (We also had an interesting ride on the Western ferry from McInroy's point, travelling stern-first through the darkness as the sea washed down the length of the car deck, engulfing the cars at roof-height in a white-out of water and spray).

As for the weekend? We were there to sing in the Advent Carol service, and there were choristers stranded who had to be in London today (Monday), so we were not alone in our anxieties. But there was another sense in which we - four of us who've sung together in the cathedral since 1968 - were on our own, and that was in the experience stakes. By now, the rest of the choir seems to be made up largely of singers young enough to be our weans, and the result for me at least is a mix of smugness and irritation. Smugness because we've done it so often that we know exactly what's required, read like pros and don't wander off in mid-piece; irritation because we were surrounded by sopranos with the voices of angels and lowly sight-reading skills and an operatic bass who had never sung in a choir before and who tended not to watch the conductor. I was quite ratty by the time the performance began (who? moi?), so the spiritual dimension was somewhat lacking, though I did manage to fit in a quiet afternoon of study (1st Samuel, anyone?) before the singing began.

I'm ratty again right now because I still can't post my photos as I want to, and lost a first version of this because of it. But there's the usual virtual Mars Bar for the first to spot the point of the title of this post.