Okay, with Advent fast approaching we need to think about what we're going to do. I guess that there is always a standard staple of music we play for Christmas, so we don't need to worry too much about that.

Last year I started mid-Advent in a parish church, only to discover that the group of girls who had been doing the music for the past 4 or 5 years had never sung "O Come, O Come Emmanuel." Surely, if you know no other Advent music, you know this one!

So for this Advent, at the risk of boring some parishioners, "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" will be sung at every mass, with different verses each week, and for weeks 1-3 I will also be doing "Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus" Advent 4 will be the usual round of Marian Hymns, with "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" as the recessional, and probably "Let All Mortal Flesh" at Communion.

The past 12 months have been quite a lot of hard work to rebuild the parish's hymn-singing tradition. This was largely achieved by selecting a relatively small corpus of hymnody which was repeated regularly so that it would be remembered by the congregation.

The various groups that took care of the evening masses before me were basically only interested in singing pop songs. One such group was entrusted to take care of Christmas Mass one year because the organist had a broken leg and couldn't get up into the choir gallery and they sang (in no particular order): "Mary's Boy-Child"; "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"; "When a Child is Born" (probably infringing copyrights along the way too!)

This clearly demonstrates the calibre of "musicians" I have had to deal with.

Any other ideas or suggestions for what I should be pushing during Advent this year?