It's Christmas Day, 2020! The stockings have been thoroughly unstuffed, and some tasty candy treats were inside. The modest presents under the tree have been unwrapped; a great blessing considering all that has happened this year. The Saint David's cakes are flaky, and grandma's orange cookie recipe still delivers a healthy dose of good feelings. And - most importantly for an amateur church video producer - our recorded Christmas Eve and Christmas Day liturgies have premiered, and I just put the finishing touches on and rendered a Christmas Lessons and Carols service, and set it to air on the 27th.

I want to pen a developer's diary, of sorts, for the whole process, so that when future me thinks of doing something similar he can look back and remember some very important pieces of information. The Christmas Eve and Day services (linked below) were very simple and lovely, and I am so grateful that my family is in a pod together and able to join me to lead some beloved carols for Christmas Day. Lessons and Carols, though, needs a bit of explication.

​When I first pitched the idea of putting together a service of Lessons and Carols remotely - with members of the choir singing choral anthems and hymns, and members of the congregation submitting the lessons - I conveniently forgot the reason that church worship teams like to do Lessons and Carols services in the first place. Absolutely, they are beautiful showcases of some of the best music our tradition has to offer, and absolutely, they let us engage with the Christmas story and the scripture of God's saving grace in a novel way, but the reason leaders love them is because they're less work. After all the planning that goes into Christmas Eve, the priest, deacon, choir director, worship leaders, and altar guild are more than happy to sit back and spend a Sunday morning afterward singing some carols out of the hymnal, leading a few anthems that the choir already sang earlier in the season, and listening to folks from the congregation - who maybe didn't have the opportunity to participate before - come up and read the lessons.

Putting together this year's Lessons and Carols service was, suffice it to say, decidedly more work. Our music director, God Bless him, took time away from his day job with a major church music publisher to record a dozen choir members singing their parts to two anthems and two hymns. It took four days of time slots to get everyone in and record safely, and he learned garage band on the fly to cut and edit and record over mistakes and produce some pretty stellar audio from volunteer choristers, who by the way also took hours out of their pre-Christmas routines to rehearse and record, and most of whom have never been through a formal recording process like that in their lives. I am so grateful for all of that work, and it sounds incredible!

Then that all came to me, and I spent more hours myself earlier this week in my own editor making sure that all of the audio levels were balanced, that no one voice overpowered any others, running noise cancellation, and getting a good, single audio track for each of those four pieces. Then came the 14-hour marathon editing session on the 23rd, where I took video of the singers, trimmed, looped, cut, and compiled them all together, put them on a nice background (a stock video of our lit advent wreath for which I thank God about once an hour that I thought to film last week) and synched it all up with the music. Then, while waiting for those complex files to render into individual videos, running upstairs to record myself in my room, belting out the hymns for which we just didn't have enough time to record the whole choir while listening to an accompaniment track that had been sent to me (and then editing those together). Then, once I had individual videos for all nine pieces of music, plus a prelude and postlude, I combined all of them with the lessons recordings into one big video project, with fades and transitions and title sequences and everything. Overall I would say that the editing process on my end took at least 20 hours, and I tried desperately to get it all done before Christmas so I could relax (and came pretty close; there was just one last lesson to slot in before rendering this morning).

Even now there are a couple of funny little editing anomalies that made it into the final cut. Some are there because I just missed them; some are there because I didn't know how to fix them; some are there because I accidentally added a fade-in to an interior video track, so that singer fades in again in the middle of a piece. There just isn't time to spend finding, fixing, and re-rendering those mistakes out, so everyone will have the pleasure of experiencing them. I won't lie, there were times on Wednesday in particular when I experienced some frustration that certain elements of the project were not matching up with my artistic vision. I wish that I had communicated better what I wanted in terms of video. I wish that it wasn't just me in my room singing three of the hymns. I wish that "Gabriel's Message" didn't have me wearing blue because I had to use our recording from Advent 4.

But then I thought about how blessed I was that all of this was possible. That despite being laid off at the start of the pandemic I managed to receive unemployment, giving me the time and resources to devote to projects like this. That I have this incredible musical gift to share, that lets me just go upstairs and crank out a hymn in good voice. That I have my family with me at Christmas, and they're willing to share their musical gifts to make it all happen. I thought about all the incredible hard work that so many people put in outside of me, collaborating to make it happen. And I listened to a young member of our congregation sing the first verse of "Once in Royal David's City" alone from her living room, and it is the most perfect version that I have ever heard, and I dare say I ever will hear. I'm crying now just writing about it, which makes the typing all the more difficult :)

​All Saints' Festival of Christmas Lessons and Music is set to premier at 10:15am on Sunday, December 27th, at https://www.allsaintspdx.org/live/. I'm here to tell you, folks, it's pretty darn good! Thank you again to everyone involved, and a very Merry Christmas to you all!

​If I ever suggest doing a project like this again, don't stop me, per se, but consider reminding me what it takes so I'm ready (and maybe encourage me to get started a little earlier, ha ha!)

Oh, here's the Christmas Eve liturgy:

And here's the Christmas Day liturgy:

In the midst of the pandemic my family and I took a much needed moment to travel to the Oregon coast. I won't say much more than that right now. I'll just drop some photographs to assure everyone that the ocean is definitely still there, still unfathomably large, and still cares little for the fleeting concerns of man.

Oh, and here are a few pictures of our SICK sand castle in the Motte-and-Bailey style! Not bad for my brother and me using the toys provided with the condo :)

I am a firm believer in the importance of black humor.

In the darkest times in history, under the most stressful conditions, and in the most emotionally demanding occupations you will often find people cracking extremely dark and morose jokes about precisely the circumstances under which they are operating. Humor provides a much needed cathartic release valve for the pressure that something like a global pandemic builds up in our collective psyche. It is in that spirit that I am pleased to present to you my 2020 Halloween costume; a medieval plague doctor!

For context during the medieval period - long before the germ theory of disease - physicians caring for victims of bubonic and other major plagues would don these deliciously macabre costumes, with full-body robes, hoods, gloves, and horrifying beaked masks that they would stuff with flowers and herbs to ward off the miasma, or "bad air" that they believed spread the plague. They would also carry a short staff or cane that allowed them to inspect a victim without touching them with their hands. Come to think of it, they weren't too far off in their guesses about spread of disease, though they thought that it was the smell specifically that carried it, and they would often put gemstones in the eyes of the masks because they thought that direct eye contact might spread it too. Choosing to dress up as a plague doctor for Halloween, even during the worst pandemic in a century, is in many ways a reminder of how far we've come and how good we actually have it compared to those that came before us.

Conditions this Halloween morning were absolutely perfect for a photo shoot*! An eerie fog settled in at the local park and I just couldn't resist heading out right away and snapping these; please enjoy!

*Of course, by "photo shoot" I mean my brother held a smartphone and took a few pictures ;)