Preparing for Christmas

In the lead-up to Christmas my brothers and I have mainly been preparing for the Christmas Eve concert at our church, in which we'll be performing (as an accordion trio) Good King Wenceslas and the first movement of Spring by Vivald. We'll also be joining two others Jireh and Jenny from our youth gruop to form a string group to perform You Raise Me Up, Humoresque by Dvorak, Jingle Bells and We Wish You a Merry Christmas.

We've had several rehearsals for the string group and it hasn't been too bad. We all performed You Raise Me Up at an earlier wedding, only instead of Jenny we had Miriam, another girl from our youth group playing with us so we've had to get Jenny up to speed (which is probably no trouble for her!).

After one of our rehearsals Tim, the guy at church who is in charge of the Christmas concert, wanted to hear our accordion trio. I stupidly took both pieces a little too fast and we screwed it up. I couldn't stop apologising afterwards as I felt we had put on a bad show! When we got home I was seriously considering changing the Four Seasons piece to something else, possibly The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba. With only a week to learn and memorise it though, it was looking unlikely that we'd be able to switch pieces, so we had to persevere with it.

We had our dress rehearsal last night before the big concert tonight. Our accordion trio went a lot better than the first time we played it to them, but the string group was slightly rusty, so hopefully we'll be able to do some practice together tonight before the concert! Aonghas is working at the moment as well, or else we'd be practising our accordion trio right now!

Last Friday night was also our last youth group for the year. While it was a little sad, we still get to see each other at church on Sunday anyway and we'll be helping out with the children's summer programmer in January anyway!

Our youth group did Secret Santa and so each of us had to buy a present for someone else, while not knowing who would be buying a present for us. My brothers and I all checked to make sure we didn't get each other, so we'd be able to tell each other who we got and it'd be so much easier to look for presents. I got an easy person to buy for (well...when I say easy, as in I know that person well!) and Aonghas's person wasn't so bad, but we didn't know Hamish's person so well!

We spent almost a day wandering around the shopping mall looking for a good present! There was one shop that sold soda-can telephones, which I thought was really cool! Wouldn't it be cool answering your Coke can telephone? It was too expensive to buy for Secret Santa though.

We eventually found a present for our people. I won't say what it is just yet. I've heard though that a lot of people just bought chocolate for their person though, which is a little sad as it takes away the uniqueness of the present! Whether I'll be getting chocolate or not...I guess I'll be finding out tonight!

For our last youth group, we handed in our Secret Santa presents before playing a few Christmas games, such as one that involved charades and a bit of pictionary. Aonghas had to rip a newspaper to help people guess what his Christmas-related 'phrase' was, and I managed to guess it was 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer'! OK I admit I cheated and heard someone else guessing it and I just called it out louder.

We also played another game where each of the teams had to come up with their own version of the 12 Day of Christmas. One team did theirs based on 'numerical facts' such as '12 months in a year' and 'nine months of pregnancy' which was quite cool. The next group did theirs based on people in our youth group such as 'nine Calums skipping', but they stole our idea of 'a 20 foot cannabis tree'! We changed ours to an eight metre cannabis tree so there! Ours was pharmaceutical-related, like only pharmacists do! (one of the other guys in our group is a pharmacist!). The last group did theirs based on our youth group camp earlier this year.

We then went for supper where youth group leader Gabrielle brought this big chocolate cake from work, and On, another youth group leader had two chocolate cakes that he had brought. Sadly no one ate his...they were probably all full after Gabrielle's cake!

On the following Sunday morning the children were to perform two songs to the adults at the church service, so Aonghas and I were asked if we could come early in the morning to help out. Unfortunately, Aonghas woke up and started vomiting! We suspect he got food poisoning from this Christmas party he attended the night before, so in the end it was just me who went. Gabrielle and I went through the songs with the children before going back to the service for a little while.

Just before the service was finished, we went back to help the children put on their ribbons and lead them to the hall. They sang a lot quieter than earlier in the morning! Then again I suppose they were probably nervous in front of an audience. As usual one random kid wandered off the stage and started walking around the place as the others sang.

After the service we had a combined Sunday School where we had some food and discussed some challenges we had faced as Christians this year, before it was lunch and I went to join the girls singing group (yes I help a little girls singing group!) for a little food. I got a little toy from one of the girls and a candy cane from another! Yay!!

To end the day, we had a music practice for the Christmas Eve concert. When we finished, Hamish and I didn't realise that we had to call our mum to come pick us up, and we ended up talking to Jenny and Jireh, the other two in the group, for quite a while about all sorts of stuff. Let's just say it was interesting, both what was said and what wasn't said ;)

Anyway I should get on to writing Christmas cards and sending out Christmas emails or else I'll be up all night. It's Christmas tomorrow afterall!