By Nicole

Tonight we took our girls caroling at the long term care facility.  My Missionettes girls are in 4th grade, and at the spur of the moment, we joined the middle school and high school girls to drive across town (a whole two minute drive) and do two laps around the really tiny wing of the hospital.   Please don't imagine well dressed girls with caps and coordinating song books.  We were a rag tag bunch singing the choruses from memory.  Please don't imagine beautiful rounds and well practiced carols. We sang off key renditions of Jingle Bells, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, Silent Night and We Wish You a Merry Christmas.  We busted up on our attempt at Away in a Manger and moved on.  This has been a pretty standard activity for my group of girls for the last, wow, eight years.  Usually I am just a tag-a-long.  Rarely am I the one that organizes any of it.  Some years we practice.  Most years we don't.  S...

On the way home from work today, I changed the CD in the stereo.  The kids and I have had the same one in for a few weeks now, and they have the numbers of the songs that they love memorized.  Every once in a while, I throw them off and change it up.  Jason goes bonkers driving in the car with us because we change CDs so rarely.  If you saw the inside of my car you would understand why I don't want to add a bulky CD case to the chaos.  So, something got me thinking about how songs are linked to so many of our memories.  Music has a way of sticking itself to the most memorable of moments in our lives.  Sometimes sad, sometimes happy, sometimes a just plain, weird memory that you can't figure out why your brain hasn't emptied that part of the recycle bin yet.  It takes up space for no apparent reason, and there is usually a song stuck to it.  I have certain artists or genres of music that bring back memories, like Nelly ...