This afternoon! Two o’clock at the Oysterville Church!  The (sometimes) annual Oysterville Christmas Program will begin!

I’m not even sure “program” is the right word these days.  A hundred years ago when my mother was a girl, it was a Program with a capital P.  All the school children were involved – each one reciting “a piece” – and there was a Christmas tree with presents for each child and, also, for the “bachelors” and others who lived alone.  It was at the churh because the schoolhouse was too small.  The whole town attended and sang carols and shared in the joy of the season.

The only all-inclusive Christmas programs I remember, by the time of my own childhood, took place in the local schools.  In those days (and even during the sixties, seventies and eighties when I was teaching) we could still sing songs about the baby Jesus and the shepherds watching their flocks by night.  And we could still call them “Christmas Programs.”  Now… the celebrations are for “the holidays” and everyone tries to be politically (or, perhaps, commercially) correct, at least in the schools.  Church is another matter, thank God (ahem!).

In the nineties – the 1990s that is – when Leigh Wilson-Codega still lived in Oysterville, she and her sisters often invited the neighbors over to the church to sing carols with them and to hear Nyel or another of the attendees read the Christmas Story from the Book of Luke.  No one called it “a program” or anything else, for that matter.  It was just an “are you going over to the church this afternoon?” sort of thing.

It was soon after Diane and Hal Buttrell moved here (ten years ago???) that Diane picked up Leigh’s idea and suggested a Christmas Carol sing-along at the church.  Gradually, she urged the Bayside singers to become involved and now the “tradition” has segued into part ‘program’ part community carol-singing, and the participants have expanded far beyond just the Oysterville neighbors.

So… perhaps we’ll see one another there this afternoon!  Hark! and Joy! and Alleluia!