This year, however, our Choir director asked for volunteers to play the bells for our Sunday Christmas Service. Several women showed up to the first practice and I was excited to have my children hear how beautiful they could sound.
During subsequent practices however, several women did not come but promised to be there for the performance. After all, how hard could it be for someone invested in doing a good job, to hit a bell when it was pointed to?
Evidently it was more difficult than we thought because it took a lot of practice to get the second,more difficult song played well. When we finally figured it out, our Choir director said that no one would be allowed to play who had not been to our practices.
Attending church was the high point of Christmas Day for my children. Not for any thought of spiritual enlightenment, but for the pure comedy of watching us play those bells. Just before I went up to play, I warned friends sitting in the general vicinity that I could not be responsible for my children’s behavior.
As I grabbed the two bells I was supposed to play, I noticed a horde of women, who had not been to practice, walk to the front and pick up a bell. One lady picked up four or five or them. Unfortunately, it was too late to grab my children and run screaming for the alley.
The first song was short and beautiful. My hopes began to rise. Even my children seemed impressed. The directors must have sensed that there might be a little trouble with the next song so, before we played it, they sang the round, to let people know what it was supposed to sound like. That was not a good idea. Now, if we played it wrong, instead of the audience thinking it was simply a tune they didn’t recognize, they would know the full extent of our blundering.
Sure enough, as soon as we started to play the cacophony began. I bit my lips to keep from laughing right out loud as I watched my boys writhe on the bench, doubled over in either laughter or pain. The song was horrible. We had a false start, and after we fumbled our way through once, our director indicated that we should try the whole thing again. Apparently she felt that the audience had not suffered enough.
When we were finished, the only thing I could take comfort in was the fact that Garret was laughing too hard to take Jason’s $50 offer to shout out, “We want to hear more of them cow bells.”I will never listen to ‘I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day,' with a straight face again.
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