I’ve been singing in the church choir since I entered high school. I enjoy the pieces we do every week, but I think the whole choir especially loves the Christmas Eve Mass music. We prelude the Mass with a handful of liturgical carols & selections from Handel’s Messiah, then ascend to the choir loft to continue with the Mass’s music.

Not only do I love all the music we sing at Christmastime, but I love the whole unity factor that naturally plays into a choir. We usually have a good core group throughout the year, but at Christmas we just about double in number because of all the college kids come home & occasional members who join us. We’re comfortably snug in the loft on a regular basis, but fitting everybody up in there for Christmas, including additional musicians, is seriously a work of divine spacing.

It really is a beautiful thing, squeezing all sorts of people together for the sole purpose of creating beautiful music late on a crisp December night, even if our midnight Mass is said at nine o’clock.