December 20, 2023.
Caroling has always been a part of Christmas Celebration. Here in the Philippines, I guess every kid has experienced going door to door around the neighborhood singing (or more like shouting) Christmas carols with DIY, tambourines and drums.
Frankly speaking, it's been decades since the last time I did that.
This school year, we are preparing for our yearly retreat. We need to raise some funds to cover the expenses. To raise as much funds as we could, we decided to do some caroling to the parents and other stakeholders of the school.
We had quite a limited time to practice last week. In fact, we only had a couple of practice session for half an hour each. Fortunately, we chose songs that we are all familiar with.
The original plan was to do our caroling gig for three days, from December 17 to 19. We were divided into two groups with different routes. We rented two passenger jeepneys to our destinations. We took off from our assembly area at 5:30 in the afternoon.
Our first victim... I mean our first host, was a former colleague and now a parent of our students. That's when I realized we don't have a speaker to play our recorder accompaniment. Our accompaniment was a recorded video of our co-teacher playing the piano.
They tried to connect the phone via Bluetooth to our jeepney's sound system, but the audio was not going through. Fortunately, our host, lend us her Bluetooth speaker.
We started singing our first song. I admit, we sounded horrible. It's like we were practicing for the first time! LOL! As we continue singing, I think we got our bearings and we sounded better. I got carried over. I placed my copy of the lyrics over the phone that I am holding. Which is playing our accompaniment. The the music stopped! We kept singing though. I realized that I absent-mindedly swiped my thump over the copy of the lyrics... which was touching the phone's screen. When I looked at the phone, I was looking at a photo, instead of the recorded video of our accompaniment. We continued singing in acapella.
After singing, our hosts offered some snacks. Not a bad start.
The second house that we went to was not on our list. It was added the last minute by one of our companions. It was her aunt. Surprisingly, her aunt was the wife of one of my former students, who is now a cop. It was in the same subdivision so we went for it.
I think we did better this time. However, it was still obvious that we lack practice. Our timing is still off, some are going off key.
She jokingly asked when did we start practicing. I jokingly answered "just earlier".
screenshot from a video shot by our host
The rest of our route took us to the different parts of the city. For each stop though, I think we continued to build up our energy and got our singing right. The others seemed to have enjoyed our singing. Aside from the cash that they gave us, most of them also prepared some light food.
As a bonus for me, I spotted this collection of traditional Filipino weapons in one of the houses that we visited. (Except for the boomerang of course).
We finished our route around nine that evening.
On the second say, we again started at 5:30 in the afternoon. Somehow we started on our first house with full of energy. We have 10 families in our list.
We run through our first four houses in just about an hour. After our fifth or sixth house, I think we have already accumulated the the same amount that we have collected the previous evening.
Photo by one of our coleagues
We were getting tired (and hungry). Fortunately, one of the families offered some refreshments and food. Actually... two families have prepared some refreshments. Tired or not though, we still gave our best and we just had fun singing (and a little dancing too). Apparently, we enjoyed the second night of caroling than the first.
The last house we went to was just in front of our school. The family just came from Iloilo and arrived also late. When we got inside the gate, we saw the food prepared on the table. In unison, we jokingly sang our "Thank You" song right away.
The family laughed and reacted that we haven't even sang our Christmas Carols yet! Of course, we sang all our songs for them before ate the food they prepared.
Caroling has become a part of Christmas celebration. I believe it's about telling the story of the birth of Jesus through singing. Although, in recent years, people sing Carols to receive monetary rewards or in our case, to raise funds... or perhaps a chance to showcase our hidden talents.
These are just my opinion anyway.
Nevertheless, even though our main goal in singing Christmas Carols to different families was to raise funds, we had lots of fun. It's also heart-warming to see the families ,especially the kids, enjoy our singing... including our sometimes off key singing.
Let me close this post by greeting you all...
#Maligayang Pasko sa inyong lahat!
Post No. 2023-57
Date Posted: December 21, 2023, Philippine Standard Time
All images are mine unless indicated otherwise
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