Angels we have heard, way up high

Tonight we had a houseful of folks over for a carols-around-the-piano party. Well, really what happened is that Kari invited herself and family to our house since we have the piano, and then she invited another person and another person and... Through a stroke of luck, 4-5 of them had to cancel otherwise I would have been looking for places to hang them on the walls in our little house.

Having a friend who was a professional opera singer (that's Kari) certainly raises the level of the parlor music, but the group singing was just as much fun. I expected we'd maybe sing for an hour or two, but nearly four hours passed as the snow fell (14 inches during the evening) and it certainly felt a lot like Christmas as everyone had to dig out cars before they could try to maneuver down our unplowed street.

Hunter and Willow in particular were not satisfied with the private dog party upstairs, so came down and both of them impressed me with how well they settled into a group of strangers. Kari's parents are visiting, so we listened to Kari's mom tell stories of growing up in England, and her dad is rather a mad scientist as Kari describes him, and always has something interesting to say.

Naturally for us amateurs, the excuse of singing carols was really just to fill in the spaces between having Kari sing for us. Toward the end of the evening I asked her to sing "The Holy City" and though I couldn't see over my shoulder from the piano, I'm told that Hunter and Willow ended up in Kari's lap trying to peek down her throat, and when she chose to finish on a note way higher than the one that was written, it resonated thickly in my right eardrum and the dogs' heads nearly twisted off trying to see where that was coming from!