St Nicholas falls on a Sunday this year, and to give people the chance to celebrate the saint’s day’s eve (with presents — that’s where Santa Claus comes from, but the Dutch usually celebrate it on the actual day instead of moving it to Christmas) we had only Vespers instead of a whole vigil, and at four in the afternoon instead of in the evening. It seems to have worked.

Congregation: 13 adults, 3 teenagers (counting the eleven-year-old who stands with Secunda and Tertia these days), 4 smaller kids.
Crew: Altar: Fr T on his own. Choir: 5 women, with Fr T filling in as bass whenever he had nothing else to do.
Coordination: Excellent, though at one point it was useful that the choir tends to follow me, because I think I was the only person who sang the right thing (the sticheron melody of the first tone; all the others tried to sing it as a troparion)
Voice: Apart from an intermittent burr because a cold wants to seize me (but doesn’t get much purchase) okay.
Strangeness: It suddenly occurred to me that saying “in the same tone” signals that what follows is something different.

Time: 2:25
Congregation: 20-40, people trickling in all the time. We started half an hour earlier than usual, so a whole lot came in at the normal time.
Crew: Altar: Fr T, adult acolyte, teenaged acolyte. Choir: All but one of us! (SSAAATB)
Coordination: okay
Tunefulness: faltering towards the end when it went from hot and stuffy to intolerably hot and stuffy
Knees: okay; ankles not so okay because a midge (or several midges) insisted on biting me on them.
Voice: started out all right but after a fit of coughing during the Doxology it didn’t recover until dosed with (excellent) Greek moonshine at the party.
Strangeness: In front of the ‘choir line’ it looked like a Greek church with all the women on the left and all the men on the right. On the level of the choir there was one man on the women’s side and five women (in the choir) on the men’s side, as well as a little girl sitting on the choir platform. Behind that it was completely mixed.

Time: 4:35
Congregation: started out 3 (all men), grew to 5 or so (mixed), 1 man was left at the end
Crew: Altar: Fr T (not in the altar except at the beginning) Choir: started out 3, ended up 2, with 5 in the middle; all women (3S, 2A)
Coordination: good
Tunefulness: all right
Knees: Oh, yes. Also feet, calves, thighs, buttocks, hips, back and sides, shoulders, arms, hands, chin and throat (my black headscarf is scratchy) and forehead (there’s sand on that floor). I did manage to do all the prostrations, though the prayer of St Ephrem the Syrian in the First Hour caught me unawares.
Voice: normal, a bit wobbly at the end of Matins on account of weepiness.
Strangeness: It’s daily Matins so the Lauds are read rather than sung. I love those psalms, especially 148, “Beasts and all cattle; Creeping things and flying fowl. Kings of the earth and all peoples; Princes and all judges of the earth; Both young men and maidens; Old men and children”. Also, four hours of darkness is absolutely no preparation for having the Ninth Ode and all the rest of Matins in the light.

Lesson learnt from the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete: however hard you try, it’s never good enough. This is a lesson I so must not learn.

Lesson learnt from the life of St Mary of Egypt: the only joy worth the trouble is what you squeeze out of the bare rock, painfully, by utter asceticism. Every bit of fun that’s easier to obtain is intrinsically sinful.

Years ago, Fr T forbade me to attend this service because it tended to teach me these lessons. It’s not for nothing that after the service it’s wine-and-oil (beer and deep-fried potato balls in my case).

Great Compline, Litia, Matins and First Hour.

Time: 2:15
Congregation: started out 4 besides altar and choir, only one was left at the end. It was a Tuesday night, of course, when nobody expects to go to church.
Crew: Altar: Fr T on his own Choir: 3 women; we sang most of the plain stuff in unison.
Coordination: good!
Tunefulness: good enough, especially as we mostly ignored Fr T when his cold made his voice go all over the place.
Knees: standing too long made them unfit for kneeling, so I had to sit between the two instances of the prayer of St Ephrem the Syrian to let them relax.
Voice: normal with a little burr at the end.
Strangeness: the service has intrinsic strangeness. It starts very Lentish, though with God is with us in the elaborate setting; then it becomes an all-out feast for Matins, and goes back to Lent very abruptly with the First Hour cutting in before the proper end of Matins.

Time: 2:15
Congregation: two, apart from altar and choir; one left during Vespers and one in the middle of Matins.
Crew: Altar: Fr T and an adult acolyte (his son) Choir: 1 soprano, 1 alto (and at times Fr T singing bass)
Coordination: decent
Tunefulness: okay, except for the times we went up, up, up, unable to stop it
Knees: didn’t start to hurt until I sat down afterwards
Voice: frog in throat, but basically all right
Strangeness: the altar people were in blue, though it’s a feast of Christ. Fr T said later that this is because of the strong overtones of the Mother of God, and indeed most of the verses are from Psalm 44 and there are several stichera with the theme of “after forty days, his mother gives him out of her hands”. Also, I saw parallels with the Presentation of the Theotokos, which I intend to blog about when my head stops hurting (slept badly and not very long).

Time: 1:40 (and 25 minutes for the 3rd and 6th Hour, during which people walked around doing things) Total: 6:20 (not counting the Hours)
Congregation: about 60; lots of children, some people from other parishes
Crew: Altar: priest, 2 men and 2 boys Choir: as large as it can be: 3 sopranos, 2 altos, 1 tenor and 2 basses.
Coordination: seamless
Tunefulness: very good
Knees: must have been okay because I didn’t notice
Voice: good
Strangeness: The fourteen-year-old acolyte was in red because he is too tall for any of the boys’ light-coloured sticharia, and not broad enough for any of the men’s gold ones (we have only two large white sticharia and the men were wearing them). The twelve-year-old was wearing the white sticharion made to his measure at Easter, which is now at least four inches too short.

Here is Archbishop Gabriel’s Christmas message (in English, with links to Russian, Dutch, Norwegian, German, Italian, Danish, Swedish and French). “A liturgical feast is not just a simple pious commemoration: it is an utterly concrete reality, transcending time, which is important for the salvation of each one of us.” —Amen, Vladyko.

Time: 2:35 Total: 4:40
Congregation: about 15, but most left after the Gospel and the blessing. I don’t know how many of those actually went on to the carol service in the Protestant church, which we’d started the service half an hour earlier for.
Crew: Altar: priest, 2 men and 1 boy. Choir: a full house! (2 sopranos, 2 altos, 1 tenor and 2 basses)
Coordination: mostly excellent
Tunefulness: good, especially the festive God is with us which Prima has a strong feeling of “I can do this!” about (and she can)
Knees: it wasn’t so much the knees acting up, but my left thigh and ankle, because after the Hours I slipped on some sand from the candle-stand cleaning and crashed to the floor. Nothing really hurt, but stiff and sore.
Voice: good
Strangeness: at the Litia, there’s a prayer asking for the intercession of a whole bunch of saints; when Fr T repeats it, he does it in Church Slavonic with a different bunch of saints, overlapping in part but not much.
Cuteness: the little girl who, realising that she wouldn’t get attention from her parents because they were both in the choir, snuggled up to her godmother. That’s what godparents are for, after all.

Here is an article about people in the United States who celebrate Christmas when it’s actually Christmas. (“The 12 days of Christmas begins, not ends, on Christmas Day.”) They’re mostly Protestants, celebrating “the arrival of the Magi at the manger in Bethlehem” when we celebrate the Theophany, but at least they do it the proper way. I wrote something to that effect once, mostly about Easter but Christmas comes into it as well.

Time: 2:05 Total: 2:05
Congregation: 4 (including the 2 children of someone in the choir)
Crew: Altar: Fr T (not actually in the altar) Choir: 3 (SAT)
Coordination: good enough, especially considering that this was the first time ever that we had this service.
Knees: normal
Voice: okay. I only got to read the 6th Hour, because there were five distinct bits (4 hours and Typika) and three of us taking turns reading, and I happened to be last.
Strangeness: we’d caught lots and lots of typos in the text (which was new, of course), and the only ones still there were in the Epistle of the 6th Hour. Three of them, and the last so hilarious that someone else had to take over from me because I was breaking down.

Every hour had one psalm that’s also in the non-Royal version and two different ones, making me pay attention more closely. What struck me most this time (it will probably be something else next time) was the cultural background: tribal, still almost barbaric. Particularly Psalm 44, which we usually have only isolated verses from. The king it describes, with his palace and his throng of women, is the material of a fantasy novel of a more mythical sort than I could write.

Lots of people including Fr T being in Oxford for exchange with our sister parish, we had to do it ourselves. And “ourselves”, in the choir at least, were only Prima and me. I’d promised her she could sing if either there were only the two of us or other people turned up and agreed.

Congregation: 7 people at Vespers, briefly 8 at the beginning of Matins, 3 after the Gospel, 2 at the end. Not counting the very skimpy choir.
Crew: 2, fortunately both alto.
Coordination: Excellent! Prima read a prayer and a psalm (long; it was Psalm 88) very competently, and the unison Doxology actually went better than at the Afterfeast of the Dormition; perhaps because we’ve been practicing it a bit in the choir. I told Prima “this is really hard, though it doesn’t look it” so she was warned, and we carried it off adequately.
Voice: An annoying frog in my throat, especially when reading, but being able to sing the whole service at my natural pitch helped a lot.
Strangeness: from the end of the Canon until the end of the service, it was completely a family affair: me and all my daughters.

Father T being in Paris with the younger acolytes so they get the chance to serve in the cathedral, we had Father M, our junior priest. He’s been trained in the Serbian church, but recently joined our exarchate and is serving as Fr T’s apprentice. He hasn’t often celebrated the Liturgy on his own yet, perhaps not ever before today.

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