Our Caroling Adventure

(Posted by John)

I was around 8 years old the last time I went Christmas caroling, so as the group gathered together on Saturday night (12/23), armed with lanterns and lyrics, I admit I was a bit nervous. To make matters worse, out of our 6 song repertoire, only one was in English ("We Wish You a Merry Christmas"), and I had never even heard several of the other Hungarian songs. But I figured that if at Pentecost the townspeople thought the Christians were drunk, perhaps the neighbors would just chalk up my strange sounds to some spiked eggnog...

In the end, however, the evening went great. Though it took several days to regain feeling in my toes, the reactions we received from the people more than made up for the numbness:

• Several familes with small children asked us to wait while they bundled their kids up so they could listen to all the songs, and then even requested an encore.


• One mother commented that she was more touched than we could imagine and thanked us for making this Christmas a lot nicer for their family


• An older Russian lady (who spoke neither Hungarian nor English) was touched to tears, and after thanking us profusely, commented that I had a really nice voice (or so I assume...)


• A family with several children tried to give us 5000 HUF (Hungarian Forints) for our performance; another family gave us a few boxes of cookies.


• One family even invited us in for some Tea/Hot Chocolate

But the most precious response of all, was one father who was home alone with two small children, and after listening to our songs, we each received a gingerbread Christmas-tree decoration made by the kids! So like many other times in life, though we intended to simply bless others in a small way, we ended up being quite blessed ourselves.