Book Club Christmas lunch

It was a dull drizzly day, so it was great to have a fun indoors event to go to at lunch time, our Book Club Christmas lunch and book exchange. As usual it was at Nancy’s beautifully decorated home - decorated not just for Christmas, but also by a number of gorgeous quilts she has made in the past. We had a few people missing, but as you can see we still had a good number. Nancy had suggested we go “lighter” as regards food this year, but we still had a good selection of delicious options, without feeling too stuffed! After the lunch, we did our book exchange, where we draw a number, and number 1 chooses a book from the pile, then successive people can either “steal” theirs or pick from the pile. There wasn’t much stealing this year. I ended up with Their eyes were watching God by Zora Neal’s Hurston, an older book from 1937, something of an American classic, but one I’d heard of, but not read. We then got down to the business of choosing books for next year. We had each submitted a couple of suggestions, some more than a couple, so we had 23 books to whittle down to 10, since January is already chosen - Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, and then in December we just have the party.
In the evening, we were out at a performance of Handel’s Messiah by Collegium Cincinnati at Christ Church Cathedral downtown. We took our friends John and Ellen with us. Collegium is a select group of talented musicians from around the city. We knew Tom, our church pianist and organist, whose principal instrument is cello, was playing, and we discovered that Dan our former choir director was playing timpani. The choir is sixteen strong, but each of them superb singers, so they don’t have fixed soloists for the solo parts, but each take a part. The other thing they pride themselves on is that they do the whole work, whereas a lot of performances miss out several selections. I’ve talked before about how important Handel’s Messiah is to me, having been introduced to it at an early age, and so no Christmas seems quite complete to me now if I don’t get to hear the Messiah, preferably in a live performance, though of course I can and do listen to it at home whenever I want!
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