I have hosted some sort of caroling party in Lansing every year since 2016, with the exception of 2020. I don’t have great documentation for any year prior to 2019, but I’ve started to collect such documentation moving forward, and you can find some of it here. We don’t go door to door. We sing and play instruments indoors, and there is food and drink. The photos on this page are all from the party at my house on December 27th, 2025.

Check out the partbooks edited by Daniel Sadowsky. We don’t limit ourselves to these partbooks, but they are foundational, both in terms of the music and in terms of the outlook. Daniel, an old and dear friend of mine from our Minneapolis days, has attended the overwhelming majority of my parties in Lansing. Thank you, Daniel!

I think it is fair to say that these parties are countercultural in several respects. We don’t pretend to have figured out what we’re doing, which is one reason we keep doing it. I think of it sometimes as the Anti-Ten-Pound-Fiddle-Holiday-Sing. It is a secular, open-house, potluck-style party open to all that tries to engage respectfully with religious traditions. We explored a collaboration with Gavri Yares in 2022, who led us in a range of international Hanukkah songs. We’ve invited and continue to invite practitioners of other faith traditions to join us, but we also respect that our efforts to engage with religious traditions in secular ways are profoundly fraught and not for everyone. We aspire to create a space for persons of any spiritual tradition, including atheists and agnostics, to have fun with music and to engage deeply with some of the profound religious and mystical imagery associated with this peculiar season. We sing some old chestnuts, but I like to think they don’t really feel like old chestnuts in our hands. We also sing a lot of music you’ve never heard and would not recognize as Christmas music. Our approach is challenging for the most skilled musicians, and yet a person with no formal musical training can join right in. Some people just eat the food and drink the mulled wine, and that is also a great way to participate.

You will experience something new at these parties, and we hope you will find them a little disturbing and very invigorating.

Past events:

2025 invitation (December 27)

2024 invitation (New Year’s Day)

2023 invitation (Feast of the Massacre)

2022 invitation (hosted at the Fledge)

2021 invitation (hosted at Grace OPC)

2019 invitation (December 27)