Christma Revels. Cambridge, Ma.

Saturday night we went to Harvard's Sanders Theater for the Christmas Revels. It was a bitterly cold and brutally beautiful night. A foot of snow had fallen Friday and the white mantle of winter laid it's winter coat across Harvard's quiet quads. The students were home for the holidays leaving the solitude and quiet of Harvard Yard to us alone. The towering silhouetted trees, each with one side coated in white, stood sentinel like over the Georgian buildings as our feet crunched the cleared but frozen white pathways to Sander's Theater.

















Harvard Yard by dave o. on Flikr


Inspired by Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, England, Sanders Theater is famous for its design and its acoustics. The theater is part of Memorial Hall which was built following the Civil War by alumni who petitioned the college to let them raise funds for a memorial to those Harvard graduates who fought for the Union cause. Many venerable academic, political and literary figures of the nineteenth and twentieth century have taken the podium at Sanders Theatre including Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, and Mikhail Gorbachev.



The Christmas Revels are a celebration of Christmas and the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. Every year the Revels choose a cultural location from around the globe that celebrates Christmas and re-enacts their songs, dances & rituals. This year it was back to the Revels' English roots and we were to find ourselves merrymaking in early 19th Century Wessex England. It is told that the vigorous country musicians of the time had little respect for the boundaries between tavern and church so long as they made a joyful noise, and that they did.


















Mellstock Band dance by Roger Ide


Participants were costumed in the appropriate attire and the wassailing began as the light hit the stage illuminating the town's church choir as they were partaking of wassail, (not to be confused with wassailing) holding their tankards and pouring some 19th Century anti-freeze down their throats. There were men's, women's and children's choirs that came together and mixed at will. The singing was boisterous and full throated and ocasionally accompanied by The Mellstock Band to recreate a village "quire" -- singers accompanied by string and wind instruments.

More photos here.
http://www.revels.org/the-christmas-revels/christmas-revels-photos/


The whole of Sanders Theater is done in a High Victorian Gothic style and the interior is gorgeous. The walls & ceiling were gleaming polished wood that had been milled and carved into a fanciful and majestic Victorian symphony. I felt as a whole as if I was transported and sitting in an English theater in the early 1800's.




The intermission was prompted by the Lord of the Dance. White clad MorrisMen dancers, with bells on their shins, started on stage literally ringing holiday cheer with each step they made. They made their way into the audience, took our hands and led us dancing into the vaulted lobby. we joyfully made our way across the entire lobby hand in hand and snaked back on each other over and over until the entire theater was in the lobby packed together cheek to jowl all singing The Lord of The Dance, smiling and nodding knowingly at each other. You can see the dance at the end of the video below.






Before we made our frozen cheek-burning way back to the car we peered through port-hole windows into Annenberg Hall which makes up the long nave-like west side of Memorial Hall. Check this out. How Harry Potter-ish is this. Wow, what a space.



















With the first snow of the season falling heavily and the temperatures quickly falling into the teens it's fun to revel in the season and take part in the timeless traditions that we are a part of and continue to add too. So participate in your holiday Wassailing and when the holidays are over a nice Wassail with friends & family can get us warmly through winter, including that dreariest of months, February, :) ... and into spring.