Why Sarah can't sing "Peace Peace" with a straight face.

Good morning all!  

Once again we are getting close to that super frenzied moment in the year when parents lose their minds, teachers wish they could drink on the job and small children literally explode from anticipation.  

I am, of course, talking about the countdown to Christmas Eve. We are two weeks away.

For those of you out there who are Christian and are religious, this is an especially busy time because,
in addition to concerts and programs recitals, projects, bake sales, craft fairs, baking, wrapping, shopping, mailing, putting together Christmas cards that make your family seem nice and normal (as opposed to the train wreck it tends to be most days)  and the general buzz of every day stuff, many churches go and throw in a mid week advent service, just for funsies.  Because what you really want to do on a cold winter's Wednesday night is put the kids back in the car and go to church.

My parents, two of the most church going religious folks I know, have, in the past, joined churches strictly based on whether or not the churches held mid week Advent services.  (They joined the one that didn't.)

All of this extra-ness of the holiday season culminates, at least for me most of my life, with the Children's Christmas Eve service.  

It's a big deal, Christmas Eve services. Parents fight for good seats so they can record their kids.  Maybe it's the 8th graders who sit sullenly until it's their turn to stand up and recite. Or a fourth grader who had one too many cookies before the service and barfs all over the kid next to him. There's always some 4 year old who cries so hard he wets his pants.  Christmas Eve service is when little girls put on a lot of velvet and curl up their hair and boys are wrestled into sweater vests and clip on ties so that they can stand up in front of church, sing a few Christmas hymns, and recite in unison "FORUNTOYOUISBORNASAVIORWHICHISCHRISTTHELORD!"

What everyone thinks the service will be.

When I was one of those surly 8th graders, our Christmas Eve service was lead by the pastor's wife, an imposing figure of a woman we're going to call...wow, I don't have a clever name for her because, well, she's was so singular. I'll call her Mrs. because if I call her anything else, someone, somewhere, might sue me. But I swear to you every word of what I'm about to tell you it true.

The high point of our Christmas Eve service the year I was in 8th grade was the singing of Silent Night and Peace Peace. This is a musical number that is performed generally with a children's choir and an adult choir. The kids sing Silent night and the adults sing Peace Peace, which goes like this:

Peace, Peace, Peace on earth and good will to all

This is the time for love

This is the time for joy

Now let us all sing together

For peace peace peace on earth.

When done correctly, it's magical.

What it typically is.

Mrs. was one of those grand women who believed in over dressing for everything. At 6'3" 275 lbs., she was hard to miss. But when she did up her mountain of curly red hair, painted all nine of her fingernails bright red (you read that right, she was missing the pinky finger on her right hand at the knuckle. Just a stubby finger...no red nail.) and donned something sparkly and flowing, she was a vision of Vegas like chic. She was the choir director for the entire church, which means the choir, the junior choir, of which I was a member, and the school kids who couldn't really sing or didn't want to be in junior choir but were forced to be in the church service all fell under her bedazzled, fleshy flapping arms.

Her vision for this song was sort of a theater in the round magic that really should involve a couple of teamsters to pull off. The senior choir was to line up behind the junior choir on the altar area. No risers, so the senior choir was sort of buried in the back. The non singing kids were on either side of her standing in lines. The organist...and this is key...was in the balcony BEHIND HER. And the bigger logistics issue was that the organ was backwards in the balcony. In order for the organist to see what was going on on the main floor of the church, he or she had to look in the mirror on the organ. Oh, and the organ bench was actually higher than the balcony railing, so there was always a certain degree of danger in playing the organ.  You never knew if THIS would be the day the organist crashed over the railing to certain death.

The service itself went pretty well. No one cried that year, or wet their pants. All we had to do was get through "Peace Peace" and we were free to go home and enjoy the real meaning of Christmas...you know, the present part.

The organist, a darling woman who shared my maiden name, and I will call her Ruth, because that is her name, fired up "Silent night" and the kids started singing on all three sides of Mrs. Then, with a point of a long red claw, Mrs. started the senior choir.

I'm not sure how it happened...okay, sure I am. The members of the senior choir couldn't see Mrs., so therefore they buried their faces in their music and ignored the fact that the organ, and with the organ the children, were pulling farther and farther ahead of them. (Average age of the senior choir...84)

In a move that was unheard of...and is now legendary, Mrs. stopped the show. "Stop, stop! Ruth! Stop playing!"

Mrs. just stopped Christmas Eve. Just like that. I was in the front row of the Junior Choir...it was all I could do to stop from laughing out loud.  No one, in the history of Christmas Eve services, had EVER stopped anything.  No, I've seen kids pass out.  I've seen wailing kids run in fear from the front of the church to their parents.  I've seen kids spill hot wax on themselves  (back when kids were allowed, nay, ordered, to hold actual live fire.)  But no one ever stopped a Christmas Eve service.  The tension in the church was a heavy cloud.

Not for the senior choir though...the bass section, God love them, didn't hear her shouting to stop...and in a silent church, the four basses growled out, "NOW LET US ALL SING TOGETHER!" before an Alto shoved them with her folder.

There was a horrible, delicious stretch of time when the room was silent, waiting for something, anything, to happen. Mrs. took a deep breath, raised her enormous arms, the light of the Christmas tree twinkling off the five diamond rings she wore on her nine fingers. "Ruth, take it from measure 84," she said.

We moved from that town a year later, and I don't know what became of Mrs. I do know this: That Christmas Eve became a legend across many parts of Wisconsin,  and to this day I will run into someone and we'll get to talking about Christmas music and they'll say, "Well, I'll never be able to sing "Peace Peace" with a straight face again."

And neither will I.

Hey, you all have a marvelous Christmas, or, whatever you celebrate this time of year, I hope it's marvelous.