My little work choir had its first performance today (I’m so very proud of them!), so I’m beginning to feel as though Christmas can’t be far away… time to sneak in a Christmas carol or two, albeit a fairly Adventy one.

The school I went to for late primary had a daily assembly with hymns. If you had been good, you got to pick the hymn for the day. In retrospect, some of the choices were a little odd – one friend always picked ‘Glad that I live am I’, because it was really short. I liked ‘I Vow To Thee, My Country’, because I was really into Rosemary Sutcliff and then the English Civil War, and the whole romantic patriotism thing. We would have Christmas Carols in September or April, and Easter songs in November. We especially liked the one about Mary Magdalene washing the feet of the Lord with her hair. And another very popular choice at any time was Gabriel’s Message, also known as ‘The Angel Gabriel From Heaven Came’. Why? Because you could sing ‘most highly flavoured lady’ at the end of each verse and the teachers wouldn’t notice and we thought this was hilarious. It just got funnier with every verse, I tell you.

(in retrospect, it seems likely that the teachers did notice and just didn’t feel it was worth the argument. Given all the giggling going on, they must surely have known we were up to something.)

(in later years, we liked to sing ‘who knows the swell of the glamourous belle’ instead of the clamorous bell in our school song, because we thought this was terribly risqué. Trust me, the song had it coming.)

So this is a bit of a nostalgia piece for me, though now I’m not ten any more I actually like it because it has a pretty tune. The group performing are just lovely – I hadn’t heard them before, and I hadn’t heard this arrangement, but I am very fond of close harmonies, and they execute them perfectly. Also, they look like they are having fun, which is always a bonus.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHuokdjT4UY&w=560&h=315]