Tradition: Forgotten Carols

I'm not quite sure when my family started reading and listening to the Forgotten Carols, but it's been around our house for years. It never really feels like Christmas until we bust out the Forgotten Carols cd.

The Forgotten Carols is the story of Constance Louise Chamberlain, a very straitlaced and Christmas-hating nurse who finds herself doing home-care for a patient named John over the holidays while his family vacations abroad. He teaches her about the forgotten carols...carols by characters in the nativity story that have been forgotten or ignored. There's the innkeeper that turned Mary and Joseph away, a little shepherd that slept through the angel's news and missed the chance to see the Christ child, a woman who held the baby after He was born so Mary could rest, and others. It's a really beautiful story with a fantastic twist.

The story is a bit long, so we spread it out over a couple weeks before Christmas. And we start playing the cd as early as possible (usually Thanksgiving day). In my case, the first listening of the year occurred in July, but that's because I'm crazy.

We've been saying for years that when we all get married, we need to make sure we get our own copies of the book and cd as a wedding or Christmas gift. I got mine when I married Aaron (getting married around Christmas time made it easy to remember) and I got a text a few weeks back from Nikki stating that she better be getting Forgotten Carols for Christmas or there would be death and maiming. Or something like that. It's an important and treasured Christmas tradition for our family.

And, for the record, you can get the book and cd for pretty cheap on Amazon. And Deseret Book has clips of all of the songs on their site (click on "sound clips" next to "description"). Unfortunately, they chose kind of weird times in the song for the sound clips, but at least it's there if you want to listen. My favorite tracks are 2, 4, 8, and 10 (which is kind of a cheat because it's a reprise of 2, but it's still good).