More harp trios and the 'C' word

I met up with Robyn and Anne yesterday and after sharing the news about our latest pieces and individual progress we ran through Dancing Lambs. We played this in our earlier rehearsals, very slowly and badly, but we now feel it is making more sense and we were able to take it at quite a good speed. The second run-through was even better and we chose a couple of bits to work on. However when we checked with a metronome what the speed should be we lost a little of our enthusiasm as we are still too slow but then decided our lambs didn't have to be that energetic. We also have our Latin pieces and played through a couple of those. In deciding when our next rehearsal should be Robyn mentioned the 'C' word... Christmas! It is still October but thoughts are already turning to plans for December. Anne has a Christmas tunes for harp book so she showed us that. While Robyn tried one out myself and Anne messed around with the chords and developed our own accompaniments. Robyn was fascinated! She can hear chord changes but isn't yet able to identify which one is which whereas Anne and I with our teaching and piano playing experience find this sort of thing straight forward, especially if the tune is as familiar as Silent Night. It was great practise adding massive arpeggio figures and embellishments to Robyn's version of Silent Night and Hark the Herald Angels Sing and we had a lot of fun. Musicians do usually have to think about Christmas around the same time as when the adverts appear on the telly as we have to prepare pupils and ensembles for performances for the end of term. Some pupils really should start to learn their Christmas pieces in August but I draw the line at October half term. I don't think my Christmas cheer would last much longer!