Author: Stacy Horn

Every year I attend the Grace Church performance of Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors. I grew up listening to this opera at Christmas, to hear it now makes me feel … like life goes on forever. I remember snippets of the holiday from my childhood, my grandparents, our house in Huntington, tinsel (never used now due to cats). Sigh.

Here’s a very short video I made of their performance 7 years ago, in 2014!! I really am a creature of habit. Another nice thing, attendees get a poinsettia out of it! The church invites the audience up onto the altar afterwards to help themselves to a plant. The green one (once red) was from last year, the red one was this year’s.

A brief video of caroling at Jenny and Christy Spiecher’s house. Jenny used to live in the first floor of my building. I have a picture from their party last year (scroll down). Two of the musicians are the same, and they are from the Romp family, from Christmas on Jane Street: A True Story. They’ve been selling trees on Jane Street since 1988. This party was packed, by the way, but most of the people were in the room behind me. Where the food was.

The maddening thing is, when I went out I realized later that I’d gotten some things for Christmas that would have helped. Like the “infinity” scarf, which would have protected with my freezing-to-death face. And ear muffs. Speaking of which, check out the Tweetie Pie ear muffs.

Well, as cold as I was, at least I wasn’t these poor guys. (Checking off bus driver as a possible mid-life career change.)

Maybe it’s less fun for people in Boston and out on Long Island (hello family!) but I plan to go out there and play shortly. I took the shot below on the roof last night. It was windy and absolutely freezing.

I’ve also got this insanely long list of articles to read, plus my blog for my book The Restless Sleep has been broken since I moved Echo’s webserver onto a new machine and that has to be fixed. I’m afraid to try. It involves learning new things.

This was a teeny one. They asked a bunch of people to write a few lines about their favorite choral movie (or movie with a great choral scene, etc.) I chose Amadeus. I’ll post a link to the piece when it comes out.

I took this on my way into Grace Church, where we sang Mozart’s Requiem for the first time this season. The Requiem is one of the pieces we’ll be singing at our spring concert. That’s in addition to Randall’s Thompson’s The Last Invocation, yay!! (I wrote about that piece in my book.) To hear a tiny snippet of it, here’s a link to a version at iTunes.