It's All in the Interpretation

Thanks to my cousin Holland for pointing out that if you misread the word 'long' in the below post and mistakenly interpret it as 'thong' it becomes a completely different story. I was not shopping for a thong with fringe for my mother.

Speaking of interpretations, I attended the kids' Christmas program at school last week. This has become, shall we say, a labor of love, to attend year after year. (No, I'm not the Grinch, I take pictures and applaude and smile but come ON).

This year we have a new elementary choir director and she didn't know the program was supposed to be 2 1/2 hours long. She thought it was supposed to be 45 minutes. The audience was visibly giddy when she announced the closing number a mere 110 minutes earlier than anticipated.


The children provided excellent, quality music, spiritual refreshment and unintentional entertainment. The highlight of my night was watching the adorable kindergartener in the front row with giant pink bows in her stubby, blonde pigtails. She clearly did not appreciate having to spend her Friday night singing Christmas carols.

She continued to sing, however, loudly and demonstrably, with her arms folded across her chest and her cute little face all cinched up into a scowl that lasted most of the night. It was kind of like an elastic drawstring. It started off fine but then someone pulled the string and everything tightened up into one giant scowl. It could not be undone without significant effort.


When it came time for "Go Tell it on the Mountain" she sang as loudly as her little mouth would open, keeping her eyebrows furrowed in the drawstring scowl, arms across chest, one on top of the other. She scowled to the right, scowled to the left and scowled at the audience. But she was still singing, doggone it.

When I looked at her and she was telling me to, "Go Tell it on the Mountain," I got the impression she had an entirely different interpretation.