65 years of carols: Lakeland family continues custom of blending voices at Christmas

Melody Stevens engaged in something of a historical reenactment on a recent evening.

When Stevens joined family members to sing Christmas carols at a rehabilitation center, she toted along her four-month-old son, Sammy. The infant, dressed as an elf in a sherbet-green jacket and matching pointy cap, mostly dozed as his mother and her kin regaled residents of the facility with favorite yuletide songs.

Stevens was about the same age as Sammy the first time her mother carried her along for the family’s annual caroling excursion. Stevens already imagines teaching Sammy the tenor parts to the carols when he is old enough to lend his voice to the family choir, a tradition that has now stretched to 65 years.

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“It’s something I really want to continue on,” said Stevens, a Lakeland resident. “I would love if he keeps coming with us and maybe one day, when I'm too old to do it, our kids will carry it on.”

The Christmas custom has continued this long largely thanks to the dedication of Stevens’ mother and aunt, the only two original members of the family choir. Stevens’ mother, Debra Jones Brown, was 5 years old when the family first serenaded neighbors in the South Lake Morton Historic District in 1957, shortly after arriving from Virginia.

The family rented a house on College Avenue for two years before buying one elsewhere in the neighborhood, Brown said. She and her sister, Patricia Jones Conner, joined their parents — Lewis Jones and Lucille DeShazo Jones — and other family members in what was for decades a Christmas Eve tradition.

The family choir would walk through the neighborhood, stopping to perform a few carols at houses along the way. Then then ventured afar to sing for people who elderly or for other reasons unable to leave their homes.

“Sometimes they offered a piece of candy or would we like them to make some hot chocolate or hot tea,” recalled Brown, now 70. “But we were trying to get to as many places as we could.”

The routine followed a familiar pattern for decades: After finishing the caroling, the family would return home for a Christmas Eve party and then head to church for an 11 p.m. service.

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Brown said that her late mother sang on the radio in Virginia to make money for her family during the Great Depression and later performed in New York City clubs while modeling clothes for Macy’s. Brown went on to become a choir director, and her sister became a music teacher.

Brown’s brother, Greg Jones, is one of Lakeland’s best-known visual artists and has accompanied the family choir on many of the caroling trips.

Though their chief intention is merely to lift the spirits of those who hear them, the Lake Morton Carolers, as they call themselves, take their music seriously. Friends and more distant family members have accompanied them at times over the decades, and Brown has sometimes prepared songbooks, deriving harmonies from Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian hymnals.

“Most of the time we did it from memory, and we knew the harmony just from singing it for so many years,” Brown said.

Keeping the custom alive

The choir typically opens with either “Joy To the World,” “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” or “Angels We Have Heard On High,” Brown said.

“Most people usually want us to end with ‘Silent Night,’ if we haven't already done it,” she said.

Along with the hymns, the choir mixes in some secular Christmas tunes, such as “Frosty the Snowman” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

Stevens said that sometimes when the choir decides to “wing it” and sing a number without having the music, it becomes apparent that not everyone knows the lyrics beyond the first verse.

“We started out trying to sing ‘Frosty the Snowman’ the other day, and then we realized we didn't actually know the words,” she said. “It’s a song people think they know the words until you start singing them.”

The family choir has sometimes dressed in Victorian outfits that Brown designed. On other occasions, they have donned what she called “wacky” attire.

“I made a big snowman — made his head out of a Japanese lantern, a guy dressed all in white and I had padding for him,” she said. “We wrapped up my niece as a Christmas gift, and I was an ornament. My daughter was tree. We had Mary and Joseph and one angel. We had a gingerbread man and a shepherd and some elves.”

Brown said it hasn’t been easy to maintain the tradition without a break for 65 years.

“I couldn't do without it,” she said. “Sometimes I'm the one to say, ‘We've got to do this. We haven't missed in all these years. We’ve got to do it in one form or fashion.’ And that's how it ended up just being my sister, my daughter and I several times because the others — it's just hard to get everybody together. The family’s expanded with the grandchildren.”

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Some details of the custom have altered over time. For example, the choir shifted from Christmas Eve to whatever day earlier in December best fit everyone’s schedules.

During the pandemic year of 2020, the family gathered in Brown’s yard to sing. That year, they honored the memory of former Lakeland City Commissioner Edie Yates, who had sung with Brown in choruses in junior high and high school. Yates and her husband, David Henderson, had been murdered in their home along Lake Morton that November.

Singing to bring smiles

At some point, the family began visiting nursing homes and rehabilitation centers as an extension of the earlier caroling at the homes of “shut-ins.” Brown said she and her relatives have a fondness for the elderly. She cared for her bedbound parents in succession for 15 years, while Stevens previously worked in a dementia unit for Lakeland Regional Health and a niece has been a speech pathologist in nursing homes.

In recent years, the family has chosen Charming Lakes Rehabilitation and Care Center, previously known as Consulate Health Care of Lake Parker, as its caroling destination. The choir — nine singers, including Conner, 83, along with two young grandchildren — made a tour of the facility on Dec. 13.

“They don't care if we sing religious carols, and the people are all smiles,” Brown said. “Some (residents) try to sing along. And, of course, the babies with us this time brought lots of smiles. So, it's just always a very happy, festive time that we look forward to. We enjoyed it, but the people we went to see enjoyed it more. There were a few people that really had no family, and us coming to sing for them on Christmas Eve was their only Christmas activity.”

Both Brown and Stevens said they have witnessed the reviving power of music. One year, while singing at a nursing home, Brown recognized the mother of a friend who had previously taken part in the caroling. The older woman had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

“But she still remembered the songs and still sang the alto very well,” Brown said. “So I wheeled her around and she sang with us, and that was really uplifting for us and a lot of fun and just a nice memory.”

Stevens, who has sung in a pair of local rock bands, recalled the family visiting her grandmother, the original leader of the chorus, in the hospital one year after the older woman had incurred a series of strokes and had not spoken in weeks.

“But she was able to remember the Christmas carols and sing with us because apparently songs are stored in a different part of the brain than other language,” Stevens said.

Brown said her mother, wearing a red stocking cap, sang along with every note of all the carols.

The family has never sought any compensation for its caroling endeavors. Brown and Stevens said they hoped their example might encourage other families to revive the faltering custom of singing for others at Christmastime.

“I just feel like that's one of the best gifts we can give, ourselves, is to give to others,” Stevens said. “It just makes us grateful that we still have the ability to do go out and do that. Some of the older family members that would carol with us have now become people that we've caroled to, in the nursing home and stuff. So, to be on the giving end is really special.”

Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on Twitter @garywhite13.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Lakeland family continues 65-year tradition of Christmas caroling