Louise T. Guinther

My family’s Christmas music collection is so extensive that we have to tuck it away during the off-season and clear half a bookshelf of everyday records to accommodate it at the end of December. It has pretty much everything in it, from Barbra Streisand’s “Ave Maria” to Enrico Caruso’s “O Holy Night” to six or seven complete Messiahs and a chorus of dogs barking “Jingle Bells.”

I love all our Christmas music, but nostalgia is an essential part of the festive season for me, and on December 25, I like to stick to the true classics — that is, the favorite records I grew up with, which will be indelibly associated with the birth of Jesus for as long as I live. The first and most beloved is a recording called Christmas at St. George’s, which not only contains the absolute best, most fun and original brass arrangements of Christmas carols I have ever heard but reminds me of one of the all-time most memorable wonders of my childhood.

Now, if you are of a certain age and grew up in or near downtown Manhattan, you may remember that at Christmastime, St. George’s Church in Stuyvesant Square (where I was baptized) used to have a crêche with live sheep. There were actual woolly animals standing out there bleating in the winter weather, and although we were always bundled into our best winter coats, our thickest tights and our warmest mittens, one of the main things I remember is that it was really cold — I mean bleak-midwinter bitter cold. If one of the flock had wanted to be a friendly beast to me and give me its wool for a blanket warm, I wouldn’t have objected. The other thing I remember is that, no matter how frostbitten my fingers and toes felt, it was worth it! What an awesome thing it was to imagine oneself one of the shepherds who heard that first Nowell, and to hear and smell the sort of critters Jesus would have heard and smelled when he was lying in the manger. And as if that wasn’t enough excitement for a tot, there was the music.

The Chamber Brass Players were the quintet-in-residence at St. George’s, and every holiday season they played Christmas carols from the steps of the church (sometimes, I suspect, with their instruments frozen to their lips), making a joyful noise that warmed one’s heart and soul and made up for the nipping of one’s nose. One blessed Christmas, some clever person decided to record their program, so that some of us tiny children who heard it live would be able, decades later, to cast our minds back to those cherished family outings with the spin of an LP. Thanks to the miracle of technology, I am now able to share the joy with you. The arrangements are by Alan Raph, the quintet’s trombonist. (He is joined by Mitchell Jellen and Jack Holland on trumpet, Brooks Tilletson on French horn and Jay McAllister on tuba.)

The record was old and worn before I had the wherewithal to dub it onto a CD, so there may be skips and scratches, but I dare you not to smile when you listen to the trumpets gleefully passing the melody back and forth in “Angels from the Realms of Glory.” This music puts the “merry” in Christmas for me every time.