December Holidays Concert with Language of Music Ensemble

This Time of Year

Daniel Choi

The holidays, a time of festivity and cheer.

Reflecting on the year past,

Awaiting the year to come,

Gratitude for what we have,

Appreciation for our ability to celebrate,

These things just can’t be wrapped neatly with paper and a ribbon.

They can’t be reduced to a parcel or package,

Shared on a certain day.

They can’t be treated like things you can exchange for something else,

Things that are valuable only this time of year.

No, they must have been given and received all year long, long before the gift giving season.

Treat every day like the holidays

The Prelude

Stella Schick

I am not partial towards winter.

The cold, the trees stripped of their leaves,

The grey, the interminable grey, and at night the

Horrible black of a starless sky. In winter it is

Supposed to snow. That is how it is in paintings,

In old pictures of gentlemen in three piece suits and

Capes having snowball fights in January. 

One gets to expecting snow, to expecting the sparkling

Twinkling warmth of a room with the windows shut

Against the cold, with hot cocoa steaming in the kitchen,

With the warmest sweaters you own, with old music on the

Stereo, the name of which only your father’s father

Remembers. With the secret family recipe, with the
Present you’ve been waiting for all year; the dress or the 

Concert tickets or the leatherbound book. With the frost

Outside, creeping in swirls up the windows, with the 

Grandparents who take you to the Nutcracker and buy you

Sweets in the intermission, and the dog to curl up with at night.

This year I watched the green turn to red turn to dead grey

All alone. There are no stars this year, only clouds turned

Charcoal grey at night. There is no snow—only freezing rain.

But with winter comes spring. In fact, without winter there can

Be no spring. Spring, the season of flowers, of birth, of

Books you haven’t read and gentle beaming sunlight. 

Life cannot come from nothing. And we are all happier

In the respite of our sadness. “In spite of us, and

Without our permission, there comes at last an end 

To the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns,” Van Gogh

once wrote to his brother, “and there is a thaw.

And so I must still have hope.”