Skip to main content

Sing-along Café Thursday, January 22nd, 2026

What a lovely afternoon spent with lovely people, singing songs with a Winter theme!

It's definitely wintry outside. Freezing cold, blustry, and I had to shovel the driveway this morning. We were warm and comfortable in the Fellowship Room, with tea and some sweet things that I had baked and frozen at Christmas for us, spicy and sweet. 

 My playlist is a varied bunch of stuff sometimes only loosely tied to winter. We listened to and sang with different versions of a few songs, settling on one vibe or another. With Baby, It's Cold Outside, we sang both and felt shocked at one (how was that okay?!!) and thoroughly enjoyed the other (young people are so much smarter). Robyn and I knew some of these songs very well, having sung versions of them with our choir. I used my old joke about loving bum-bums (actually do, though) when we sang Wintersong. Other songs we all knew well from hearing them on the radio. We enjoyed the Alicia Moffet version of Winter Wonderland because it didn't feel like a Christmas song for a change. It's good to walk outside and wonder at the beauty of winter, and it's also good to sit inside in the warmth of connection.

We're going to stick with the Winter theme for next week since we have so much music left, and so much winter left too. Something we talked about was the idea of winter as a season of life, getting old. I have some positive songs about the winter of our lives. I really want to sing that song from Frozen too!

Here's a sampling of what we sang and listened to today:

  • Button Up Your Overcoat by Nancy Sinatra 
  • Baby, It's Cold Outside by Frank Sinatra and by John Legend
  • The Boxer by Simon & Garfunkel
  • California Dreamin', by the Mamas and the Papas
  • Cold as Ice by Foreigner
  • December, 1963 by the Four Seasons
  • It Never Rains in Southern California by Sonny & Cher
  • Snowman by the Barenaked Ladies
  • Snowman by Sia
  • Song for a Winter's Night by Gordon Lightfoot, by Sarah McLaughlan, and by Blue Rodeo
  • Winter Song by Sara Bareilles & Ingrid Michaelson
  • Winter Wonderland by Alicia Moffet, by the Euythmics, and by Blake Shelton 


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sing-along Café Thursday, October 30th, 2025

We are ready for Halloween!  My theme today was Halloween. I found a couple of playlists of Halloween music on Apple Music, and we started with the one that is designated as a sing-along playlist. Apple Music Sing is a feature that I don't have on my devices, but there are playlists that are made for it, so all the songs on the playlist have scrolling lyrics. That's good enough for us.  We started with a song that we loved singing, but we wondered what made it a Halloween selection. The others were pretty obvious. I made a connection with newer songs about love being magical and the singer feeling like he's under a spell and two much older songs, by Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. There were a lot of similarities. And, we noticed that those older songs are pretty hard to sing along with. Sometimes we think that new songs are tricky. We laughed about how we "know" lots of songs and can sing the chorus, but have no idea what the words in the verses are, maybe beca...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sing-along Café Thursday, October 23rd, 2025

It was a lovely afternoon in lovely company!  The first afternoon café was very nice, but we really hope to see more people there next week. It's a good time of day for singing, and one hour is a perfect amount of time. Parking is a bit more difficult during the day, and we have to remember that we cannot enter the parking lot behind the church, the manse lot, because of the small children there. Leave some time to find parking, or park down by Riverwalk Commons, lots of spots there.  Today’s theme was instrumental parts of songs that we sing along with. "Songs with Instrumentals that we Sing" is the name of my playlist. Sometimes there’s a big brass fanfare or a drum fill or an electric guitar solo that’s so good that we sing that in addition to singing the words, and sometimes it’s the best part, where suddenly everyone is singing (they might not even call it singing, but it is!). Imagine a bar band playing Sweet Caroline. The whole bar sings the "ba-ba-ba!" ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sing-along Café Thursday, November 6th, 2025

Another wonderful afternoon! I was inspired by some planning I was doing for my choir (the York Region Community Choir). I was looking at wartime songs to use for sing-alongs at a performance next week, when I realized that I could add them to a playlist I had. The playlist is "Songs for Keeping Love Alive". We hadn't used it before, so it was new to everyone.  We started with a couple of songs from the WWll era, songs about love and faithfulness surviving a separation. Then, we had a few songs about how a man can show his love for a woman, and how couples can stay together, what keeps a couple going forever (having fun, we agreed). Looking at the lyrics of love songs is always fun. Sometimes, it can be a little embarrassing, funny, and mostly relateable. Something I had intened to sing but forgot was Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Old Oak Tree by Tony Orlando & Dawn. Next time! There are lots of songs on this playlist that we can do another time.  We talked a lit...
Post a Comment
Read more