Quick hits from Christmas 2012

This may be the first of several posts as I process some of yesterday, finally.

I'm fairly sure it was mostly because of playing it for the first time after hearing Fr. Satish' homily at midnight mass - which dealt heavily with the comparing and contrasting events surrounding Jesus' birth with those of Newtown - but may have also been due to the pre-service being less hectic yesterday morning, but When He Comes hit me pretty hard at Christmas 9:00 mass.  I had to fight back tears as we sang: "When He comes, the children of ages will die nevermore," then somehow managed to make the transition to Can You Hear the Christmas Bells without losing control of my voice.

I've wanted to play on Breath of Heaven for as long as we've been doing it, but they didn't publish chords with our arrangement, plus my voice has always been needed in past years.  Now that we have four other voices on each men's part, I looked up the chords online.  They were in the wrong key, but only by a half-step, and I think they only had one or two chords wrong, both of which I recognized and figured out right away.  I ended up just memorizing it rather than writing the chords onto the music (which I'll likely regret the next time we pull it out).  Oh, it was wonderful!

The mass setting we're using this year is well suited to the classical, which I also think fits better with the violin and bowed bass, so I didn't have deal with nearly as much switching between guitars as on Christmases past.

The other new piece we did which was a big hit was Rise Up and See the King.  What a fun piece!  I think it would have fit better in Advent, but that also made it appropriate for the beginning of our prelude music. It wasn't originally on the menu for morning mass, but it was so fun and so well received that we rearranged things to include it. (We really didn't need to do Gesu Bambino again anyway, even if we do use the first choir arrangement of it I've ever really liked.)

I may have teased Teri just a bit over her suggestion that she might have lost her mind if I'd done 5:00 mass, too, this year (i.e. "oh, it's too late to avoid that!").  The truth ended up being that, with the way things worked out, I'd have likely lost mine if I'd committed to it.  (yeah, too late for that, too.)