14 December 07 - 15:21
Holiday Concert
My husband and I took the afternoon off work yesterday to attend the school's Holiday Concert. We're lucky that for this one last year, all three kids are in the same school, so we only had one concert to go to. I was talking to one of the moms at the church who's going to three!
Our eleven year old daughter was greeting at the door, and her delight to see me was matched by my delight that she had my ticket for me. I quietly joined my husband in the audience – I was on time for once, but the rotters started five minutes early – and tried to look encouraging as the first year string players shared their gift of music with us. I enjoyed the subversive head bopping of one of the clarinet players as the band broke into a Dixieland version of a holiday tune. We waved back at our five year old son, was that against the rules? He was one of the few who waved. Our nine year old daughter sang like a star, and just as they were finishing, she finally spotted us in the audience. I knew that she had, because her smile went from a thousand watts to about ten thousand.
I thoroughly enjoyed the concert, not just the presentations by our own kids, but the whole thing. I discovered that even though we've been back in Halifax for less than six months, I knew kids in every class, in the band and both string ensembles. Some of them play with my kids, some of them are kids from the church, some of them belong to families I've met in the playground. The kid who played Santa Claus was the son of the minister in a neighbouring United Church. Different classes sang in English, French, and Arabic. I felt a sense of connection not just with my community, but with the wider world.
I couldn't understand the parents who got up and left the instant their own kids were done. The seats were half empty by the big finale. One little girl was crying because her daddy had missed the performance. Surely every kid deserves to strut their stuff before a full audience, and I think anyone who bailed the instant their own kid finished really missed the chance to build connections to a wider community than just their own immediate family. Surely Jesus came to teach us about building those kind of connections, and that's more important than fussing whether people call it a Christmas Concert or a Holiday Concert.
That's on the brain because last week, an angry letter was circulated through church channels about school Holiday Concerts, trying to recruit support to help put the Christmas back into the concert. Her point was that this was a Christian holiday being celebrated, that this is a Christian country, and they were organizing their sister churches, the RCMP and the war vets to boycott the school's "Holiday Meal" until Christmas was put back in the schools.
I don't know about that. I am unabashedly Christian, but one of my eleven year old daughter's best friends is just as unabashedly Jewish. My daughter made her a Chanukah present, and her friend made her a Christmas ornament to put on our tree. One of the girls who comes around to our house is a recent immigrant from Iran. I've never asked her about her faith, but I do know that she very enthusiastically helped us put us our Christmas tree when I for one was still struggling to get into my first Saturday morning coffee. Maybe these kids understand Christmas better than I do. Is the boycott really about returning the Christ to Christmas, or is it about going back to the "Good Old Days" when church and culture were one? I wonder, which kids I saw performing yesterday don't fit into that vision of what the Good Old Days were all about? And is a boycott really an instrument to bring people together, or is it basically the same thing as when the parents walked out after their own kid was done?
At the Holiday Concert I went to yesterday, brought to me by faces from every corner of the earth, everyone had a voice, and even if it wasn't called "Christmas" anything, I felt the presence of a universal God who loves all God's children, even the little string players scratching out at best a rough approximation to "Angels We Have Heard on High." I heard the angels. They were right there in front of me.
Blessings, Heather.
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