Your Daily Dose of Christmas

I think that my college choir performed this one year at our annual Big Christmas Music Hoopla, otherwise known as Christmas With Wartburg. Those programs were quite the undertaking, and they consumed four nights of our lives at the time: a performance on campus on Thursday night; a performance twenty miles down the road at a really big Lutheran church in Cedar Falls, IA, on Friday night; a performance at the Civic Center in downtown Des Moines on Saturday night; and a performance back at campus on Sunday afternoon. (The poor Choir, at the time, then had to do a performance of its own right after that fourth performance, during some kind of coffee hour, if I remember right.)

It was a lot of work and, coming as it did at the end of the fall semester, it put a lot of pressure on us students who also had to worry about finals and such. But those were some deeply special concerts, and I was more than a little bit 'at sea' in my senior year, when I was no longer in the band and thus was not involved in any way with the program. Those were wonderful times. In my sophomore year, I decompressed after the Sunday performance by watching Casablanca (this was the period when I discovered the film and watched it six Sundays in a row). The next year, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country opened on Friday, so right after the Cedar Falls performance, The Girlfriend (now The Wife) and I quickly changed and bopped over to the theater to see it. Good times. I miss those programs.

This is "Salvation is Created", by Pavel Tchesnokov. It's a live performance, so there's audience noise, and ignore the graphic...the music is the thing here.