Our guest blogger this week is Drew Smith, our Development Director.
When is the last time you went caroling? I highly recommend it this holiday season…it will warm your soul on a cold December evening. Whitney Kahn, our senior program director and I took a group of 8 high school kids caroling last night and it was awesome! All the kids are active members of our Leaders Club. I mentioned to Whitney that I wanted to take a group of Leaders who can carry a tune (Lord knows I can’t!) on a little trip around town to go caroling to some of our donors. So the kids enthusiastically embraced the idea, went to work on learning three different songs to sing (Silver Bells, Angels We Have Heard on High, and Deck the Halls).
So we ventured out and stopped at about a dozen homes and I only wish more folks were home. About half the folks we went to see were home, so I guess in baseball terms we were batting .500 which is a great number…but when you’re out there caroling, you want to sing to actual people.. But it really didn’t matter…and I wish everyone could have seen the huge smiles on the faces of these kids when they heard this right after their first carol of the night, “I haven’t been Christmas caroled in years! Thank you, thank you, you guys were great!”
Even when folks weren’t home they sang anyway…and maybe the neighbors got to hear the harmonized vocals of these 8 high school students donning their Santa hats with mini flashlights and cell phones in hand to illumine the sheet of lyrics in the darkness of the night.
What really struck me was how these teens just totally immersed themselves in this endeavor. They were loving it…really having fun…going from house to house singing carols, joking with each other, and counting down the minutes until the post-caroling pizza party. (By the way the pizza at Carmine’s in Eastgate was amazing). While they scarfed down the pizzas they were talking about doing it again next year! And we’ve already got some plans in place to make it bigger and better, so stay tuned.
So if we didn’t get to your house this year, keep a lookout for the YMCA Leaders Club carolers in 2010.
So when's the last time you went caroling? And what's your favorite Holiday Song? Share your favorite memories and we'll pick the best one for a great YMCA Prize in January!
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