Christmas is Coming!

Christmas is upon us - the decorations are up, the carols are playing, the people are shopping, yay for the festive season!

On Saturday a few of the fellowship groups from our church including our youth group went to Waitakere Hospital to do some carolling. It was a bit random and felt a bit weird because it was like a group of Asians stopping at various places such as beside nurses' stations, in empty lounges and along some corridors singing carols in English to what seemed to be an invisible audience! I guess the people in the wards probably would've been able to hear us even if they couldn't see us. There was one time when we heard clapping about ten metres down the corridor after we finished singing! We also had one elderly patient in a wheelchair who told us she'd be offended if we didn't sing Silent Night! So we happily obliged! However there was one guy sitting in the lounge before we arrived. I saw him fiddling with the remote control so I'm sure he must've been trying to watch TV before we invaded his territory! Apparently he sang along with us once we got going though so that wasn't too bad then.

Our next round of carolling will be outside the Tofu Shop near Warehouse Stationery. Oh dear goodness.....

Our church is also having a Christmas Eve concert at church and I was asked to get some music performance prepared for it. Originally I thought we would play an accordion trio as well as maybe get some of the others from our youth group to join us to form a string group. The others were keen to get the string group going and with the help of one of the church members who is really good at music, we've been practising lately. It'll be the first time I've performed the cello since 2006!

As for the accordion trio, I've been trying my hardest to find suitable music to play. After attempting to arrange some big-band/orchestral music for three accordions before giving up, I decided to juts look for quartet music on the net. I managed to find Once in Royal David's City which sounded really cool and a jazzy version of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. We went through them the night before the day the lady chasing me up wanted to hear them when I discovered the latter didn't sound too great. I ended up spending all night looking for other Christmas songs and listening to them with no success. Unfortunately I suffered from Christmas carol haunting throughout the night :S

Anyway the lady who has been chasing me up on the music performance has been (I think) a little worried, thinking that nothing has been prepared for the concert which is only a week and a half away as she isn't aware of the string group's existence. She wanted to hear our accordion trio yesterday at church. Just before she did though the guy helping run our string group talked to her and she realised there was a bit of a miscommunication and decided they would probably just go for the string group and not the accordion trio. I ended up wasting the first few weeks of my holiday on nothing!

We went Christmas shopping (and buying a new lightbulb for our newish fridge!) and one of the funniest things I found was this - soft toys that are part of a 'Fruit Salad' series, such as Tracy Tangerine and Pamela Pineapple with tags that say

'NOT FOR CONSUMPTION'

It's great seeing Christmas decorations up everywhere too!