My scheduled Christmas post

Many moon ago, when Ragin' Dave was just a wee thing, he attended Midnight Mass at a local church.  It was a Novus Ordo parish, as I didn't even know the Traditional Latin Mass was still going, but it was an old fashioned church nonetheless.  We had a full blown pipe organ; a 1920 Black organ. And we had an organist who knew how to play it.  He was, and still is, one of the true masters of the pipe organ.

Have you ever heard the phrase "Pulling out all the stops"?  That is a reference to a pipe organ.  The organist as "stops" arranged on his organ.  Pull one out, and the sound gets louder.  Push one in, and the sound gets quiet.  Pull them all out, and you have a pipe organ at full volume.

This being Midnight Mass at a semi-traditional church, many of the parishioners were someone older.  And they weren't used to being up past midnight.  Which means that by the time mass ended, many of them were half-asleep.

The last song of the night was "Joy To The World".  And the organist pulled out all the stops.  On a vintage, 1920 pipe organ, in full working order.

You could see a WAVE of sound roll over the congregation.

Woke them up properly for the drive home, it did.



Feel free to sing along.  I sure did.