A Christmas Carol

We heard the letterbox snap Sunday morning and found an invitation to attend a carol service this evening on our front mat.

Personally, I'm a fan of attending the big, big carol services - like the one at St Paul's Cathedral. Not only is it a pretty good show, but normal admission to the cathedral is around £6 (that's almost $12 these days) - and the fee is waived if you're attending a service. But the Vol-in-Law is not keen as he feels he's being treated "like a piece of meat", which I grant is not a positive feature in a religious ceremony. Apparently, the big shows - like the one at St Paul's or Westminster Abbey are getting packed out these days - some hundreds of people were turned away from St Paul's Christmas Eve service last year (when we were in Lawrenceburg where we did not attend any church - although we did go to the Grand Ol' Opry on the 23d).

Since we didn't have any Christmas carol service planned we decided we'd go to the one where we'd been invited. Apparently it's our Church of England parish church - St Luke's - though I didn't have a clear idea where it was. Apparently the C of E has been guilty of gerrymandering their parishes in the past - and ours is oddly shaped and our house is tucked away in a distant cranny of the parish. Either that or they leafleted the wrong street.

The service was pretty good, the congregation was very friendly, and I knew most of the carols. The Vol-in-Law was impressed by the service, he was still talking about it the next day. But I guess there are some cross-cultural variations that make it hard for me to settle in at a carol service even after 10 years of living in England (not that I attended services every year). Here were some things that struck me:

• Why can't they just let us sing out of the hymnal? That way I could have written music. I'm not the best singer but I do read music and so if I don't know a song very well I can at least drag myself along by sight rather than blundering and guess work. In fact, does the Church of England have hymnals or did you put them away before inviting the unwashed public in to your carol service?
• Some British Christmas carols have extraneous notes - sort of like the "u" in colour. They aren't necessary and they'll always trip up the unsuspecting. For example, I know "Oh little town of Bethlehem" as a somber and simple song - it was presented to me as a song full of ladders and trills.
• Too much bloody organ for me. The organ filled up one of the "wings" of the church (sorry, I don't know the official name, but I didn't grow up in a church with wings) and the sound boomed throughout. What with the saxophone and the bass guitar and the flute and the really, really high-falutin' soprano in the choir - I could barely hear myself sing, never mind try to anticipate the next note in a carol arranged in a way I didn't expect. Maybe I had too much Church of Christ growing up - but didn't Paul say raise up your voices in praise - not raise up your monstrous organ and cacophonous band. (Gee, that's some imagery I didn't anticipate in a post about Christmas church services)
  
• English churches are cold, especially at Christmas time. Expect to sing in your coat. But parish churches are less cold than cathedrals. At my local parish church - I only needed my sweater.