Sunday, December 10, 2006

One of My Favourite "Holiday Events"

One of my favourite holiday events (even though I've only done it twice now) is to hear The Northern Lights concert. In case you don't know, at any given moment over the past quite a few years, at least one of my good friends has been a member of a Toronto men's a capella chorus. The chorus, The Northern Lights, puts on a show every Spring and every December in addition to the competitions they enter. I don't see them perform very often, but tonight I was fortunate enough to attend their Christmas concert. It's the guys singing Christmas carols as well as some invited guests. This year the guests were The Oriana women's choir, Dr. Patricia Wright (organist) and Tammy Snow-Johnston (soloist). To top it off, the concert is held in one of Toronto's finest churches, The Metropolitan United Church. It was a beautiful concert. I hope that I get to go hear those guys sing every year for a long long time.

The rest of today was extremely busy. It was a classic Saturday for me. I take a bunch of things that I really like to do but try to cram them into a tight schedule, throw in some deadlines, and kind of suck some of the fun out of the whole experience. I managed to keep it together today, more or less, but it could have been even more fun if I wasn't trying to juggle so many things. The big motivation is that tomorrow (or, well, I guess officially today now), I'm throwing a Christmas cookie exchange party. So today, I baked the 80 Linzer cookies, went to Kensington and bought the groceries for brunch tomorrow, stopped in a The Dude show looking for gifts, met Rob for dinner and Terroni, and then went to the concert. I was also supposed to have gone to an open-house party at my friends' place but I didn't make it. I didn't finish baking until 2:30 (I started at 8:30), was showered and out of the house by 3:00, done at Kensington at 5:00, at the craft show for half an hour, and then met Rob at the restaurant at 5:40. That's at four of my favourite things (baking, walking through the market, shopping at a craft show, and listening to the TNL concert) all in one day!!!!

Last night Rob and I decorated the tree and the house for Christmas. We're not done yet, but at least it's mostly ready for guests. I have a bit of tidying up to do in the morning. And I need to package up my cookies. Then pull together the brunch and set out plates etc.. All before 11. So - I should be off to bed so I can get some good sleep before it's time to get started. Luckily, the event is small and the attendees close enough friends that they wouldn't complain if I was preparing food while they were arriving (or if they discovered that the clean laundry is in fact, not put away in drawers, but haphazardly stuffed in baskets and shoved in closets).

Talk to you soon,

B.

2 comments:

Kern said...

Man, now _I_ wanna go!

I gotta go check out my local Barbershop group again sometime soon. They're not the Northern Lights, but they're pretty fun.

Andrew Clarke said...

Hi Rebecca, I'm helping out Metropolitan United in the implementation of a new content management system for their website. As a result of this change, some links to internal areas of the site are no longer working. This is the case for the link you posted to Patricia Wright's bio page. This is now at www.metunited.org/node/472

Google of course helpfully shows us a list of all the links to internal places on our site, which is how I found your post. Thanks!