My (professional singer) daughter was home this past weekend armed with the intention of reviving (and recording) a family Christmas tradition.  With her permission, I will sharing twelve Moments Musicaux over the next several days in the place of a standard blog entry. (The description of this blog includes music, after all).  You will hear and see my wife, Priscilla, Ellen Broen, our daughter, and our son, Graeme Biddle.  I hope you will enjoy them at least as an interlude from holiday bustle.

Ellen explains it best:

“On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…

12 days of singing!

I will be sharing with you something the world has never seen — howmy family used to celebrate the holidays every year. These are the people who taught me to love music, and who even taught me to sing. Each year, we would find a day to play Christmas music together as a family. We rarely rehearsed — it was more of a ‘dive right in and do it’ sort of thing. Sometimes it was all of us singing, sometimes it was all band instruments (2 flutes, a clarinet, a trumpet, a trombone, and a bassoon), and sometimes it was all strings (a banjo, a mandolin, a guitar, an electric guitar, and a standup bass)… but whatever configuration we decided, it was just about making music together. It was FULL of wrong notes, flubbed words, Mark improvising blues/jazz into everything, and all sorts of questioning looks shot across to each other to make sure we would make it to the end at the same time… But it was US.