Marysville Stake Christmas Concert

Last year the concert got snowed out because of almost 2 feet of snow and water pipes breaking in the Stake building. This year, there was dry weather until the night of the concert when it started to snow. I was not going to to cancel again, no matter what! So, it was "on with the show!"

I am presently the Stake Music Chairman, so one of my responsibilities is to organize and direct our stake's annual Christmas Concert. The Concert was wonderful! Many people told me they felt it was the best Christmas Concert they had ever heard.....anywhere. We have some very talented people in our stake and it was wonderful to be able to work with them. We had around 60 people in the choir this year.......and WOW, what a sound! There were 14 numbers in all, lasting about an hour and 20 minutes.


Jenni came up from Fall City, to play "Carol of the Bells" with the choir......the choir sang, then Jenni played her own arrangement of George Winston's arrangement of Carol of the Bells, then the choir sang again. It worked out wonderful, and of course Jenni stole the show, as usual. My neighbor came and his comment to me later was, "You daughter can sure play a mean piano!"

Ron's first counselor in the Stake Presidency sang the solo for "The Wexford Carol." We wanted to do the Tabernacle Choir version, so I contacted Mac Wilberg (who arranged it) and asked him if I could buy 50 copies for our Stake Music Library. His secretary wrote back and told me that he hadn't published it yet, and that the music was still in his hand-written manuscript. I decided that we couldn't wait for him to publish it, so I transcribed the music from their recording of the song, wrote out parts for the pennywhistle, harp, piano, choir and strings. It sounds just like the original, so anyone listening would think it was the Tabernacle Choir version of it. Wayne did a wonderul job singing it. He told me afterwards that he "rewrote the lyrics to the second verse"....all quite by accident, during the performance! I was concentrating so hard on keep the right beat, that I didn't even notice. (the beat changes from 4 to 3 to 5 beats per measure, practically every other measure, so it takes a lot of concentration!)

The only other solo we had was by Cherlyn Ferguson, who is almost related to me.......(she is my cousin Rick Sutherland's neice) she sang "The Maiden and Her Child." It's a beautiful Irish melody and Cherlyn did a wonderful job. I had piano, flute and bowed psaltery accompany her......it was an incredible haunting sound and gorgeous!

I am already starting to put music together for next year's program. It takes a lot of time to find the right music, then write the narration and do any arrangments or writing of orchestra parts, so that's why I need to start an entire year ahead of time. Little by little the word is getting out about the high quality of our little concert. We had about 700 people attend on Sunday night, and I'm sure that it would have been closer to 1,000 if it had not started snowing.

Speaking of snowing........back to the story of our drive home that evening. Ron, myself, my mother (who had come up to listen to the concert), Greg Wilcoxson (Ron's executive secretary) and Mike Rounds (the Stake Clerk) were the last ones in the building because we had to take down the sound system that we rented, put the extra choir chairs away and bascially put the building back in order. We didn't leave until just after 10:00. As we started driving north, we hit a full-scale blizzard at about the Arlington exit.....just barely a couple of miles north of the stake center. It was snowing heavily all the way home. There was lots of heavy snow on all the limbs of the trees and it was truly beautiful.....until we got to the bottom of the hill that goes into our subdivision on Camano Island.

There were a half a dozen cars parked at the bottom of the hill, so that should have been an indications of how slippery the hill was, but we were determined to get home! So we charged ahead! We didn't even make the crest of the first little rise, and we were slipping so much that we stopped dead in our tracks. So Ron backed down and we got the chains out of the trunk. (Mind you, we are in our Sunday best.....best suit, concert attire and stilhlettos) Ron carries our rubber boots in the trunk, so he donned those and his ski parka (which is also stored in the trunk during the winter) and proceeded to put the chains on.......only to discover that one of the chains was broken. We decided to try going up the hill with only one chain........we didn't get as far as we did the first time up the hill! So back down we go....

By this time an hour had passed and we were getting rather frustrated, to say the least. I put my rubber boots on and got out to help Ron. Ron decided to put the broken chain on anyway.....he just tied off the part that should have attached to the chain. We crossed our fingers and gingerly started up the hill again........ This time it worked! Broken chain and all, we made it up the one mile extremely steep hill to our home!! It felt so good to get home.

The next day it warmed up and all the snow melted. It went from 20 degrees to 52 degrees!

Next year when it comes time for the Christmas Concert again....let's just all pray that if we have snow, it waits until the day AFTER the Christmas Concert!