Something for Christmas, as Lynn says.

I was thinking the other day about the Christmas programs at my high school (I attended a private school so they felt they had more of a free hand at explicitly doing "Christmas.")

Several years we did a Messiah sing, which was fun and nice (even though I wound up in the altos because I was deemed to have an insufficient top range to be a soprano). But one year they let the Languages department plan it. And so they selected one carol in each of the languages taught at my school: Spanish, French, Latin, and German. And I think they tried to pick "characteristic" ones - the Spanish and French ones I was not at all familiar with until that year. (And we sang them in their proper languages even if we were just doing it phonetically).

So, I've tried to find each one on YouTube. In the case of Fum, Fum, Fum (the Spanish carol), I had to take one done in English - most of the Spanish version I found were, apparently, "dance remixes" and were not in the style of how we did it:



And in French, we sang, "Un flambeau, Jeannette, Isabella":



(I really like that one. Very nice version, and I love it when people can sing a capella like that.)

For Latin, there was Adeste Fidelis. (And oddly enough, that's the only one I remember most of the lyrics to in the original language, though I took four years of French in high school and no Latin. And yes, I am known to occasionally break out into it this season.)



(Here's a second version. I don't know if it's just my connection or not but midway through Carerra's singing, the audio gets a little breaky)



I do love choral music, sung by a large choir. It matters not if it's a "boy choir" like here, or a church choir, or a group of semi-professionals.

And then finally, for German, O Tannenbaum.



(Heh. Yes, a little different there, Nat King Cole's version. I don't know German well enough to know if his pronunciation is any good or not. And you know, I do love Nat King Cole even if he was regarded as "old fashioned" by the time I made the scene.)

And yet another version, because I love Vince Guaraldi also, and a lot of his arrangements say "Christmas" to me. Having grown up watching the Charlie Brown Christmas special EVERY year since I was a very small child, this is extremely evocative.



I think I need to get out my CD of the soundtrack to that special and listen to it.