Nine Lessons and Carols, part II

For those of you who I haven't told already: we made it to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols (mentioned in an earlier post)!

The only way to get into the service (unless you're in with the College bigwigs) is to queue. So, Jackie and I got up early on the 24th and arrived, by foot, outside Kings' College at about 7am. The queue was already at least a hundred strong:

The queue at 7am in front of Kings' College.
The Chapel is just visible behind the bright lights that mark the entrance to
the College against the dark sky. Dawn in Cambridge is just past 8am.

The queue was admitted into the college grounds at about 7:30am. We started introducing ourselves to the people around us, a highly suggested early-day activity in the purple leaflets entitled 'Information for those in the queue' that we were handed upon entering the college grounds. Breaking queue for short breaks (~20 min.) on a wait that long is expected, so knowing those around you is important.

Most of the folks around us were local. The two tennis players in front of us had a 5 mile drive to get to the city center; after stores opened around 9am, they took turns nipping out to get last minute Christmas presents at nearby department stores. A man and his adult daughter a few spots behind us were real veterans of the queue; coming to the service is has been his Christmas tradition since his teens when his father first brought him. We learned another 'tradition of the queue' from them: many old-timers take a break at noon to head to the roaring fire at the Eagle (the local pub of RAF and Watson and Crick fame), which starts serving strong drinks at noon. A Canadian man and his wife got to the queue early and then--a Christmas present from their daughter, now a Cambridge local--an undergrad showed up at 9am to hold their spot for the next 4 hours. We also chatted with a Belgian lady (wearing a fuchsia Lands End down coat) and her welsh husband, attending for their second year, and a lawyer from New Zealand practicing in London.

Several people behind us, there was a group of Chinese students (including one of my mentees from the English Language Mentoring Scheme at Churchill). They were some of the lucky few to be interviewed for NPR when Michael Barone came around close to 11 to get soundbytes from the shivering masses in the queue. (I'm pretty sure it was him; he looked familiar from the NPR recording of the Craighead-Saunders organ I attended at Christ Church in Rochester last fall)

The excitement level in line rose noticeably at about 10:30, when the choir paraded by in their top hats and purple scarves.

the first choir sighting of the day

There was more excitement at 1pm, when an a capella group came around with rousing holiday tunes, like 'Chestnuts Roasting...' and 'Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer', and a former chorister worked his way down from the front of the line doling out Christmas cheer from a large box of chocolates.

We were finally allowed into the chapel at about 1:30. We were allowed to take pictures before the service (without flash). Here's the interior of the chapel with from my seat right in front of the altar at the head of the chapel:

the chapel before the service
the candles roughly at head-level between the organ and I are in the choir stalls

The festival opened with an organ introit to 'Once in Royal David's City.' The introit ended and the chapel was filled with silence and palpable anticipation for 5... 10... 15 seconds. A single, silvery voice broke the quiet with the first verse of the carol.

For me, it was the interplay of the space and lighting and the songs of hope sung by the fantastic 30-voice choir of silence that made the festival so much more than the radio broadcast I'd heard in the past. The sun sets here near 4pm these days, which meant that the chapel got darker and darker throughout the festival, which goes roughly from 3-5pm.

My favorite carol of the festival was a Latin text, sung to the Holst melody I know from "On This Day Earth Shall Ring." The choir sang it just after it had gotten truly dark outside. It felt so hopeful and jubilant.

I can see why locals make this service an annual event. While I won't be making any special trips back to Cambridge just to hear this service, I'm really glad I went. My experience listening to live broadcasts from Kings' will never be the same.