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Community band tunes up for holiday festival
10:31 AM CST on Sunday, November 25, 2007
On the last Thursday of each November, a devoted group of musicians has a date on the downtown Denton Square. Their goal is to get about 5,000 people in the mood for the holidays.
The Denton Community Band has opened the city’s Holiday Lighting Festival on the Square since its inception in the 1980s. They strike up the Christmas carols as night falls and downtown Denton gets dressed up for the holidays.
Carol Lynn Mizell said the band has started the season in a lot of different ways, but the musicians have always supplied seasonal music with verve.
Mizell has conducted the band for 29 years.
“We got a call from the city to do this,” Mizell said. “Different years, we’ve been different places for it. Early on, when there were trolleys here in Denton, we played the music on a trolley with a parade of carolers behind us — with the windows open. We’d stop at stations along the way. Meanwhile, people were there with their flashlights and songbooks. We would end up on the Square.”
During the past 10 years, the band has played from a platform near the Christmas tree on the Square. The event officially starts when the tree is lighted.
Mizell worked with the founders of the event to compile the songbook that is given away before and during the lighting. If you flip to a song and see only the lyrics, that’s because copyrights prohibit printing and distributing the music without a charge.
“It’s [the songbook] a mix of sacred and popular [carols],” Mizell said. “It’s all ages and serves all people. [It’s] for those for whom it is a religious holiday, and for those for whom it is a gathering of family and Santa Claus.”
For close readers of the songbook, Mizell has an explanation of the different font used for the final verse of “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” Somehow, the original song they used before printing the songbook used only the first three verses, meaning the carol ended without spiritual hope in the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem:
“That would have left us with: ‘And in despair I bow’d my head/ “There is no peace on earth,” I said/ For hate is strong and mocks the song/Of peace on earth, good will to men,’” Mizell said.
She added the fourth verse to the book before it went to press, ending the carol thus: Then pealed the bells more loud and deep/God is not dead, nor doth He sleep/ The wrong shall fail, the right prevail/With peace on earth, good will to men.
Judy Weir has played her French horn in the band since 1981, and the only lighting she’s ever missed was when ice closed the event.
“It’s just so much fun to see the excitement on people’s faces when they come out,” Weir said. “They just kind of light up.”
Mizell said she and the band wouldn’t miss the holiday lighting.
“Oh, it’s satisfying to me that you’re singing Christmas carols with 5,000 of your closest friends,” Mizell said. “It’s part of our civic duty and civic pride. Denton is getting larger and larger, but there still is a feeling of community.
“Kim Campbell from the Dallas Wind Symphony was here one year for a Dallas Wind Symphony performance, and he walked up to the Campus Theatre and said: ‘It’s just like a Norman Rockwell painting.’ It really is. You arrive, and here’s the town band playing Christmas carols on the city street. It’s something that’s not plugged in. It’s people making music on acoustic instruments. It’s very talented people. It’s something very, very special, because anyone could turn on a CD player.”
LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com.
Sing-along
What: Annual sing-along to start the Holiday Lighting Festival on the Square
When: 5:30 to 6:20 p.m. Nov. 29
Details: Free. Free songbooks are available at the Denton Record-Chronicle, 314 E. Hickory St., and at the festival
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