Better Together
Probably everyone who loves Christmas also loves Christmas music. Another of our favorite Christmas traditions is attending the annual Christmas concert of the Cookeville Community Band. We enjoyed doing this very much on the Sunday after Thanksgiving.
High school students, college students; active and retired public school band directors, college professors, and local musicians make up this local band, directed by Carroll Gotcher. Mr. Gotcher is the director of the middle school and high school bands in Jackson County, Tennessee, which is where Ray and I live. He is a public servant who pours his heart into those bands and the Cookeville Community Band in the adjacent county. I love to see his obvious joy and enthusiasm whether I am watching his students march and play in our local Christmas parade or watching the community band concerts in Cookeville.
Ray and I met our daughter Mary Evelyn and her family at the packed Cookeville Performing Arts Center on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Poinsettias lined the front of the stage and a lighted wreath hung high above the percussion section. The band members were obviously ready to have a good time. They and their instruments were dressed up for the occasion. It was fun to see their individuality. A trumpet player was dressed in a nice suit, looking like someone ready for an important stockholder’s meeting. The clarinetist in front of him wore the navy Christmas jumper I see her wear every year with her white tights and sparkling ruby red slippers. A teen boy in front of her donned a jaunty Santa hat. The clarinetist in front of him wore a blazer of bright red Christmas plaid. The bell of each clarinet was decked out in red glitter bows.
Many flutes had tiny Santa hats on the ends of their mouthpieces. One flautist wore a Santa hat on her head that hung down to her knees.
Sophisticated Mr. Gotcher was dressed in the most surprising attire of the afternoon. He surely would have won the prize for most creative costume. His suit coat and trousers were rimmed with embroidered Christmas lights!
The highlight of every Cookeville Community Band Christmas concert for me is when they play Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride.” I love the entire song, but it’s especially fun when the percussion section makes the sounds of the whip and the sleigh bells. This year the band made that even more fun. As you can see, the percussionist came to the side stage and brought out increasingly large wood blocks each time the sleigh driver “cracked the whip.”
Before the concert, I enjoyed greeting our longtime friend Marilee whose husband John plays French horn in the band. We got to see John after the concert. Almost the first words out of his mouth were, “I can still play.” The teen boy in the Santa hat and our 80-year-old friend John exemplify the spirit of the band. Here many people from various walks of life come together and work together to do something beautiful. As Mary Evelyn said after the concert, the performance could not have happened without all of those people working together. It took everyone doing his part or her part, everyone playing his or her own particular instrument. It wouldn’t have been the same without the whole.
In life there are times for individual achievement and service, and there are times when things go much better when people cooperate and create something wonderful together. Bands demonstrate this; families can do that, too.
. . . speaking the truth in love,
we are to grow up in all aspects
into Him who is the head, even Christ,
from whom the whole body,
being fitted and held together
by what every joint supplies,
according to the proper working
of each individual part,
causes the growth of the body
for the building up of itself in love.
Ephesians 4:15-16