Is it Christmas yet? Cycling home tonight, I couldn’t help but notice that the illumination fans down the end of my road have got their Christmas lights up and running. That feels a bit early but it is certainly time to be making some preparations.

One of the things I have been doing is preparing some music, including a set for jUKEbox, the ukulele group I play with at work. We do a regular slot at the Christmas Fair hosted in one of the University buildings and that appointment is starting to loom. I’ve been pondering how to put the set together and had arrived at the conceptalicious idea of taking The Twelve Days of Christmas and making it even longer by interpolating a bunch of other seasonal songs. When I sat down and worked it up last night, I was delighted to realise that most of our Christmas songs happen to be in either C or G major, so I could bunch them by key, do a little sorting to create a suitable flow of moods and styles and have something ready for today’s rehearsal.

We gave it a run through today and it worked reasonably well but it was about twice as long as I had been aiming for. Tonight I sat down and recorded the whole lot and I’ve then put some time into nips and tucks getting much closer to the 15 minutes I was aiming for. A bit more work to fine tune the music for the group (mainly chord and lyric sheets) and I can release version 2. And then, a bit more practice and we’ll have a decent set to busk through a couple of times at the fair.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

[Yes, we’re doing the Slade one…]