For the second year in a row, we were treated this week to the beautiful voices of Charlotte Catholic High School’s Honor Choir, as they visited The Ivey to serenade members and staff alike with beloved Christmas carols and holiday songs.
Led by Dottie Tippett (a veteran choir director and member of the CCHS faculty), basking in the glow of these young ladies’ vocal talents has quickly become one of our favorite annual traditions!
As the sweet sounds of their renditions resonated throughout The Ivey, one word kept coming up for me. That word was: Timeless.
The songs they were singing were truly timeless numbers. Songs like “Carol of the Bells,” “The First Noel,” and even more contemporary tunes like “What a Wonderful World.” I mean, just consider the timelessness of a lyric like this:
The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky,
Are also on the faces of people going by.
I see friends shaking hands, sayin’, “How do you do?”
They’re really sayin’, “I love you.”
“What a Wonderful World” has the soul of a Christmas carol. As far as I’m concerned, it should be added to the holiday canon from this point forward!
These songs are the closest things to time travel that we are ever likely to experience. Their melodies and words possess the power to transport us to other times and places – childhoods, yesteryears, bygone eras. They dig deep and uncover “forgotten” memories – like torches shedding light on treasured moments from the past – many of which we have inadvertently packed away and put out of our minds.
The more the passage of time and the complexities of our daily lives conspire to push our precious memories further into the background, the more grateful I become for these timeless holiday songs. During this time of year, they are like magical keys unlocking dusty old boxes full of priceless antiques – always in our possession, but too easily forgotten.
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