I’d been grousing for over a month. Same thing every year. What a curmudgeon I’d become.

“You’re kidding. Christmas music already?” I was amazed that the store was unapologetically already playing Silver Bells.

 “I KNOW! It’s not even Halloween,” said the woman standing behind me.

Every year the bombardment of holiday music began earlier. Parking lots became festooned with red and green tinsel often as early as Labor Day.

I felt like Scrooge—like I’d lost all vestiges of the Christmas spirit.

Then one day, I saw an announcement for the Sing-Along-Messiah at the Mission. I had an idea.

“You want to do what, now?” responded my sister, after a period of dead air on the phone.

“I want you to come up and go to the Sing-Along-Messiah with me.”

“Geez, it’s been six jillion years since I sang that.”

“Who cares?” I said. “It’ll be fun. It’ll bring back memories.”

Jan and I, as well as our oldest sister Nancy, had the good fortune to grow up in San Rafael where a man named Byron Jones lived. He was music director for our church and the school district, as well as being a professional singer with a rich, booming, baritone voice typical of many Welshmen.

Under his careful (and often intimidating) tutelage the three of us learned to sing in the church choirs—youth choir, then high school choir, then the adult choir when we were home on college breaks.

Every Christmas Eve, for as long as I can remember, we sang two services—one at 6:30 and one at midnight. Always we’d sing the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah—a tradition as dear to the three of us as family camp or telling jokes around the dinner table. We considered ourselves fortunate to have had that musical opportunity.

So Jan came up from Goleta, and we found ourselves sitting halfway back in the packed Mission with the Messiah songbook in our hands.

“Too bad Nancy can’t be here,” I commented. But she couldn’t have left her busy bed-and-breakfast on a December weekend—even for this!

“I used to sing this alto part without music,” Jan said, scanning the book. “Now I don’t think I can do it even with the music.”

I, too, was dismayed that I couldn’t sight-read music any more. I hummed up and down trying to find the melody or even the starting note. “Oh well, who cares?” I said, just as the small orchestra began playing at the front of the church.

Boom!  After five notes our old memories kicked in and we were singing at the top of our voices with grins as broad as the Cheshire Cat’s.

We thought we sang beautifully. Maybe we did or maybe we were terribly off key. It didn’t matter. We simply blended into the hundreds of voices reverberating off the old plastered walls of the Mission.

A joyful chill ran down my back. My eyes teared up. I was back at the First Presbyterian Church in San Rafael on Christmas Eve—singing beside my sisters with eyes fixed on our choirmaster. I’d been one of the lucky ones—taught to sing by a very talented man. For that gift I will be forever grateful.

Now when I start to feel a little Grinch-ish about early Christmas decorations cluttering the stores or holiday music dominating the airwaves, I stop and think:

Thank you Jan, for coming to sing with me.

Thank you Byron, for teaching us to sing.

And of course, thank you Handel for giving us such beautiful music.

“Merry Christmas,” I say to clerk. And I mean it.