Christmas is coming

I like Christmas

I like it a lot.  Family, friends, occasional snow, carols, Christmas dinner.  Fab!

I am a teacher, I teach young children so Christmas means Nativities and Christmas concerts too.  This year, one of my many changes has been to move into teaching a KS2 class (from Foundation Stage),  change I didn't want and wasn't looking forward to.  Thankfully, it has not been as bad as I'd thought.  Bits of it I really quite enjoy.  I am used to the chaos of the Nativity Play.  Finding costumes, begging for hall time for rehearsals, repeating lines over and over.  I've missed that a bit this year.  As a junior class we do a Christmas concert at our church. We went down to practise for the first time today. So far so good and I'm told that this is the smoothest it has gone for a long time.  Fingers crossed there.

I am also responsible for the choir at school.  (Also new for me as last year I shared this responsibility with another member of staff.) It consists of children from all KS2 classes.  Last night we took part in an Advent service with lots of other local schools.  I am EXTREMELY proud of them.  They sang their hearts out, moved together and smiled the whole way through. I'm sure they don't know just how brilliant they are.

This time of year though I think about MY school.  Not where I teach, where I went. We always started Christmas with a Carol Service in church.  The whole school (and their families) attended.  I sang with our choir.  Christmas had really begun then.  After leaving school members of the choir we were invited back to sing with the choir again, which I did until my school closed.

A Christmas ritual that I truly miss.  I hope that one day that the children I work with now will feel just as proud to have been a part of our choir as I do at having been part of mine.