Repeat the Sounding Joy

by Nan Reinhardt

I love to sing. I can’t sing. I mean I have a truly terrible voice, but I love to sing. Especially at Christmas. So Pandora’s Christmas Classics starts playing at our house before Thanksgiving and NPR gets switched to the Christmas station on the car radio as soon as B105.7 becomes all Christmas music all the time. I’ve played James Taylor’s holiday CD so many times I’m surprised it isn’t worn through and at least four times a week, I hunt for the Eagles version of “Please Come Home for Christmas” and Allison Krause and Yo-Yo Ma’s gorgeous rendition of “The Wexford Carol” on YouTube and play it while I’m working.

Hello, I’m Nan and I am a Christmas music junkie.

It’s not just the holiday tunes that we all know and love—you know, the ones that send warm little snuggly hugs throughout your whole being? “Winter Wonderland.” “The Christmas Song” (Nat King Cole’s version, of course). “Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” “Jingle Bells.” Even the more up-to-date ones like “All I Want for Christmas” and Leonard Cohen’s haunting “Hallelujah,” make me happy.

But it’s the Advent singing that takes me into the holidays with the gladdest heart. All the lovely carols we sing as a part of Sunday worship in December and the special music. “Mary, Did You Know?” “Who Comes This Night?” “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” And of course, “Oh, Holy Night.” My Aunt Ruth Audrey used to sing that beautiful carol every Christmas Eve while my cousin Susie accompanied her on the piano. Aunt Ruth had a gorgeous contralto that sent shivers down your spine when she hit that first “Oh night divine…” As a kid, that’s when I knew it was truly, truly Christmas.

I miss her. I miss those family Christmas Eves and the singing around the piano and lighting the advent candles and Mom reading to us from the second chapter of the gospel of Luke and my grandfather’s turkey dinner on Christmas day. I do what I can to make our Christmases as special as they felt when I was a kid, but even today, it’s the music—the carols, the songs about snow and pie and winter wonderlands and silver bells that truly bring the spirit of the holiday to life for me.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you and yours and if you need a little holiday boost, turn on some Christmas music and sing along. Your heart will thank you.

Aside from being my travel partner, beta reader, and dear friend, Nan Reinhardt is a USA Today bestselling author of sweet, small-town romantic fiction for Tule Publishing. Her day job is working as a freelance copyeditor and proofreader, however, writing is Nan’s first and most enduring passion. She can’t remember a time in her life when she wasn’t writing—she wrote her first romance novel at the age of ten and is still writing, but now from the viewpoint of a wiser, slightly rumpled, woman in her prime. Nan lives in the Midwest with her husband of 52 years, where they split their time between a house in the city and a cottage on a lake. You'll find all you need to know (probably more than you ever wanted to know) about Nan here: https://linktr.ee/nan_reinhardt. And links to all her books here: https://tulepublishing.com/authors/nan-reinhardt /.