As I "mature" the things on my Bucket List gain more importance. Although I'm not Mormon, I have most of the Mormon Tabernacle Choirs' CDs and have ALL of their Christmas CDs. In fact, those are the ones I find myself listening to most often during the Christmas season. I've always dreamed of attending their Christmas Concert in Salt Lake and decided this past year (2012) to bring it up to my Book Club friends. All four of us are music lovers; three of us are church organists and one even has a music degree. They were eager to help me fulfill that bullet on my Bucket List! In October, we applied on-line for the free random tickets, not realizing what an impossibility it was of actually GETTING the tickets. In fact, all of us received the dreaded email stating: "Sorry, but over a million people applied on-line for tickets to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's Christmas Concert. Your name was not drawn." Are you kidding me? A MILLION! We were disappointed, but now had a realistic grasp of how unlikely it was that we would have ever gotten tickets. Then... the last part of November I got a surprising phone call from one of my friends --her son had gotten four tickets in the mail to the concert! (Each of us had our children also apply to increase our odds...) Before the day was over we had plane and hotel reservations in place. Unfortunately, one of our Book Club friends was unable to go.
The trip was more than I imagined --it even lightly snowed the whole time we were there and yet, the sidewalks were not slick. Everything was beautiful. We attended an organ concert in the Tabernacle, toured Temple Square, researched our early ancestors at their incredible Genealogy facility, and watched countless brides and grooms exit the Temple in the snow after their weddings. That evening we eagerly entered the Conference Center (which is the largest non-sporting indoor facility in the world) and then sat in wonder at the incredible sound of the choir and orchestra. We were so lucky that Alfie Boe was the guest performer along with Tom Brokaw. AMAZING. After the evening concert we saw the lights of Temple Square and ate a late night dinner on the top floor of the Joseph Smith building that overlooks it all.
The trip was more than I imagined --it even lightly snowed the whole time we were there and yet, the sidewalks were not slick. Everything was beautiful. We attended an organ concert in the Tabernacle, toured Temple Square, researched our early ancestors at their incredible Genealogy facility, and watched countless brides and grooms exit the Temple in the snow after their weddings. That evening we eagerly entered the Conference Center (which is the largest non-sporting indoor facility in the world) and then sat in wonder at the incredible sound of the choir and orchestra. We were so lucky that Alfie Boe was the guest performer along with Tom Brokaw. AMAZING. After the evening concert we saw the lights of Temple Square and ate a late night dinner on the top floor of the Joseph Smith building that overlooks it all.