Norway

I've been meaning to write about the series of choir concerts I participated in a week ago. To celebrate Norway's 100th anniversary of independence from Sweden, the community choir I sing in performed many, many songs in Norwegian. Some of the selections were beautiful sacred works by Greig (one of my favorite composers) and several selections were Norwegian folk songs arranged for choir about topics such as a valley of simpletons that bounce around singing dum dum ta dum do do do doo doo and a pig with a hind end bigger than the pastor's cottage. We sang several Norwegian Christmas carols and some works by the remarkable F. Melius Christianson, a Norwegian American composer who founded the St. Olaf Choir. I particularly enjoy singing his music.

The concerts were surprisingly fun. This was rather astonishing, because learning the music was very taxing, we weren't really well prepared and, quite honestly, up until the first concert, we sounded terrible: out of tune, and clashing over exactly how to pronounce each Norwegian syllable. But things amazingly came together, and I ended up really enjoying myself, even though it was an ordeal to leave my children and get to the concert every day (ever tried to curl your hair with a toddler at your feet who empties the entire contents of the bathroom vanity drawer on the floor, tries to eat the toilet cleaning brush and slobbers your only solid black velvet dress?)

Perhaps the best parts of the concert were seeing each church filled with little old ladies wearing their Norwegian sweaters, and Sons of Norway members who handed out a wide selection of delicious Norwegian pastries and cookies after each concert. I do love Norwegian sweets: butter and sugar, butter and sugar, butter and sugar.

And I learned many things about Norway that I was in the dark about, for example, that they have only been an independent country for 100 years, that they dress formally in bunads, and that they have a very beautiful national anthem.