🎻 The Impossible Task: Tuning 1,000 strings, solo, before the concert.
📚 Classroom Check-In: The low-stress project to save your sanity post-show.
🎶 Music History: Why you might want to teach the full, complicated truth about Jingle Bells.
Greetings!
It’s holiday time—which for many of us is the busiest (and most stressful!) stretch of the entire year.
Every season I ask my students to double-check the spelling of their names for our program (yes, I still have paper programs!), and without fail, there are issues! Nicholas is really Nicolas without an H, and Harky is actually Harley. The annual adventure continues!
🎻 The 1,000 String Challenge
This is also the time of year when we’re reminded—loud and clear—that many of our colleagues and administrators have no idea what we actually do.
I teach 250 students, grades 3–12, and the expectation was that I would run a concert entirely by myself with some behavioral support from four teachers.
When I asked how exactly I was supposed to tune 1,000 strings by myself…
The blank stares said it all.
Thankfully, my community is helping out.
A few friends are stopping by to help tune, my students are leaving their instruments in the auditorium after school so I can fix any slipping pegs, and my high schoolers will be stepping up as mentors. It will get done—somehow.
But afterward? I’m heading straight to bed… or straight to a bar. (Possibly both.)
Where do you go to celebrate after a concert?
And do your administrators ever reveal—unintentionally—that they were definitely never in music?
📚 December Composer / Holiday Music Project
Right after our concert, I switch gears and have students complete a composer/music project. It gives them a well-earned break from playing and helps us hit those non-performance standards.
For December, we dive into familiar holiday music so students can explore the history behind the tunes they hear every year.
Here’s the project outline:
Choose a holiday song.
Research the composer and their background.
Analyze the lyrics:
When were they first sung?
Was the melody borrowed from an earlier tune?
What country did it originate in?
Was it originally written in English?
Any unfamiliar or outdated words?
Create a poster to display in the hallway
Extra points for visuals—hand-drawn or printed—so it’s not just text.
👇 Check out some of the posters my students created:
🎄Holiday Music Histories You Might Not Know
The stories behind our favorite holiday songs are surprisingly rich—and sometimes surprising!
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen is quoted in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. It’s actually the carol referred to in the title!
While we’re on that song: the comma placement is a long-debated issue. Is it God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen or God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen? I lean toward the latter now that I know Shakespeare used “God rest ye merry” as a complete phrase in one of his plays.
Vince Guaraldi wrote all the music for the Charlie Brown specials, and his jazz trio performed every note. (How many specials did they play for? More than most people think!)
Jingle Bells has a complicated history. Composer James Lord Pierpont sold much of his music to minstrel shows—an important and difficult truth to acknowledge. One of the later verses also contains inappropriate content. I still teach it because it’s such a classic 5-note tune, but I always teach its history alongside it.
Holiday Composers Collection – Printable Slides
P.S. 🚨 Need to save time after the concert rush? If you liked the holiday history facts in this newsletter, don't miss out on the resource that inspired them.
Grab the ready-to-use Holiday Composer Collection (25 composers!) below👇 and get a head start on your December project!
