I'll be leading an SATB door-to-door carol sing in my area--21st year in a row. We meet for a potluck at my place, rehearse about 10 minutes, then hit the street.

We sing to anybody who has Christmas decorations up or who we are sure wants to hear us (usually from past years).    Some people from my choral group, some from the Washington Men's Camerata, some neighbors, some kids.   We sing out of a packet with some standard arrangements, some not-so- standard (e.g "Gaudete"), some just words and we make up the harmonies on the fly--e.g. White Christmas, Winter Wonderland.   We are getting more and more Hispanics in the area so we now sing some in Spanish. Latest is the haunting lullaby "A la nanita nana".   We also have traditions like singing Adeste Fideles in Latin (one verse) after singing the others in English, singing one verse of Stille Nacht in German after singing the others in English.

There are usually about 15 to 20 of us. I figure above 20 we won't be invited into houses. We never make much headway on the street--usually about 1 1/2 blocks or so in 2 1/2 hours.   It's hard to get 20 people to go anywhere. And if it's cold we are tempted to sing quite a few in warm houses before moving on.

Anybody who wants to join us along the way is welcome.

We also take all requests, whether in the packet or not---and usually can fill the requests.
If we don't get invited in, we sing 2 songs and move on--the second song a request of the family we are singing to.

Then after this we go back to Jan's and my place and continue singing til all hours.



The whole thing is a real kick--and quite a few people, singers and listeners, seem to look forward to it.