You may be looking forward to gathering this holiday and singing — or you may be dreading that. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On my Mind" commentary says even from a ragtag choir, those harmonies are more useful than ever.
Some friends came over the other day to sing Christmas carols.
They handed us lyric sheets so we could sing along. There ended up being six or seven of us singing, more or less in the same key, as we made our way through “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and “O Come All Ye Faithful” and “Joy To the World.”
We probably didn’t need the lyric sheets. These are songs we’ve known as long as we’ve known anything. It’s a mystery and a miracle how songs stick in our memories. I still remember “Kookaburra” and “On Top of Old Smoky” from first grade. And I’m sure I knew all the traditional Christmas songs before that. The first song I ever learned to play on our family’s old plastic Sears Roebuck organ was “Silent Night.”
I don’t know about you, but I don’t sing a whole lot around other people. Probably should do it more. It opens up your lungs, brightens your spirit, literally puts you in harmony with the world.
The great secret of choirs is that if you put enough voices together, they can’t help but sound good. All the off notes get absorbed by the true ones. Even a ragtag bunch of non-singers can make a lovely sound if they do their best and come into it with open hearts.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
This is an inharmonious time in many ways, and a lot of us will feel it even stronger here at the holidays. There’s no point in ignoring that, or stuffing it deep inside. It seems to me the better move is to also reach for harmony wherever we can find it, and comfort, and the things we still have in common.
We’ve had a tough few months here in our household. We’re ragged and exhausted. There’s a lot of it I’d like to forget. But I hope I’ll always remember those few minutes we sang Christmas carols, not just to the people we care about but to ourselves, letting those ancient melodies take us back to a place of love and hope.
The holidays teach us, among other things, that there is always time to begin again. Sometimes you just have to allow yourself to sing the first note.
Tommy Tomlinson’s On My Mind column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
