Hallelujah! My Christmas chorus memoir (an animation).

I don’t remember trying out for Miss Nina’s baby-blue choir. I was 4. What I do remember is the reaction to my audition. The grown-ups all burst out laughing. They said I “broke the sound barrier.”

Breaking the sound barrier was a fairly new concept at the time, and people didn’t always use the term correctly. I wasn’t fast. I was loud. “JESUS LOVES ME, THIS I KNOW!” (The Bible told me so. Everyone else, for blocks around, heard it directly from me.)

Nina Norman was a beloved fixture in our church, having taken it upon herself to nurture a bouquet of children’s choirs. She even sewed a robe for every member: red for the boys choir, green for the girls, and purple for the younger set, starting at about age 6. The even-younger baby-blue choir was her new project. It probably didn’t matter if any of us could sing, as long as we could line up and be adorable. Or bunch up. Or, at least, not wander off.

She didn’t work us hard. The adult choir did the heavy lifting every Sunday. We tiniest ones maybe put in an appearance on Easter, but we owned Christmas Eve.

That was us, leading the processional, followed by the purple choir, who got to hold actual candles. Miss Nina funneled us to our assigned rows. Evergreen boughs scented the air. Candles were everywhere; the smell of melting wax was enchanting. And the place was packed. Even our congressman made his annual appearance.

We were too young to be self-conscious. Miss Nina crouched down and stage-whispered the lyrics, as if she could lift the music out of us all by herself. Those of us who weren’t busy pointing at our parents or watching the purple choir peel candle wax off their hands did the best we could. It was our job to take care of the little Lord Jesus, and we did well by him, I think.

I aged through the robe colors until I reached monochrome adult. My voice became more refined and reliable, but the sheer headlong exuberance of the baby blues was missing. One day, the choir director asked me to do a solo, assuming I was planning to use the voice he heard in practice and not the one preceded by a full week of high anxiety. It was horrifying. There’s a high G out there somewhere that I broke so thoroughly no one can use it again. Time passed, I went away to college, and my voice compressed to a dense alto. 

But the longing lingers. That’s why I go to Sing Your Own Messiah events. Everyone who was ever in a church choir has sung Handel’s “Messiah.” I show up with my antique score in hand.

There’s an attempt to group us into the component voices, but people want to sit next to their friends; the balcony is a catchall for latecomers. We resemble less a force of standing armies than a ragtag band of conscripts. This does dilute the sopranos somewhat, which is helpful because otherwise they would take over. It’s what they do.

Maybe the director salted the crowd with ringers who knew what the next note was, and (bonus) when it was. And nobody was far from a knot of sopranos, so there was no reason to hold back because no one would hear us anyway. But anyone interested in glory to God was definitely in the right place. 

The challenge is greater if your voice is no longer the one you learned “Messiah” with. That means you have to sight read, which works fine for a while, but sometimes the sheep go astray, and you have to sideline yourself and figure out where to hop back in. And the sad truth is that it’s not as much fun being an alto. No one can hear you. Your glory is less glorious. So once my vocal cords got as limber as they were likely to get, I jumped over to the soprano line to see if I could hold on.

I opened my throat, but all I got were phantom notes: I could feel where they used to be, but they weren’t there anymore.

Well, nobody could confuse us with professionals. The director made the mistake of telling us that “He trusted in God” was her favorite chorus, but it’s tricky. We tumbled over one musical mogul after another and fetched up at the bottom of the piece in a heap, at more or less the same time. In the moment of silence afterward, when the director was searching for something nice to say, a voice from the balcony rang out: “Nailed it!” 

I don’t think Handel would have minded if 500 people burst out laughing in the middle of his masterpiece. I know Miss Nina would approve. Now we were loose, now we were ready, and, with joy and with abandon, we exuberated: all of us sopranos in spirit, and 4-year-olds in our hearts. 

Hallelujah!