With microphones and accompanying keyboard set up, Choir Club vice president Eileen Terral (11) began to count in the five singers for the first of their ten-song caroling set, “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire)”, Dec. 13.

“The performance went really well,” Terral said. “I’m really proud of how far the club has come, because in the past we haven’t really done a lot of caroling events and didn’t do full carols that were fully flushed out with different parts. But this time we actually learned a lot of different carols that had harmony in it. It was a big achievement for us, I would say, just to be able to sing carols that had different parts [like] ‘Aude Lang Syne’, which had three.”

The Rancho Peñasquitos Town Council’s 12th annual “Cookies and Cocoa” holiday bazaar featured the club’s caroling, along with a Frozen medley performed by Westview Theatre Company (WVTC) and other festive acts from various youth performing arts organizations. The event, one of the club’s first performances this year, doubled as a community toy drive and fundraiser.

“[The event coordinator] told me that our club and the Theatre Company helped make the event special, which I’m very happy [about],” Terral said. “It’s nice to be able to do things for the community and have fun at the same time, which is something that I think Westview Choir Club can definitely further expand on and continue doing.”

According to WVTC member Kate Wood (11), who performed the WVTC medley alongside Carly Isleta (12) and Terral, the event brought the performers together.

“I think it really builds culture to have a community where teenagers can just go up and sing and express [themselves] and have it be a creative outlet,” Wood said.

She and Terral first coordinated the Choir and Theatre performances separately, but eventually began to collaborate, with Terral joining Theatre’s medley. This event marked one of the first interactions between Choir Club and WVTC, which the exec board and Theatre council will encourage in the future. According to WVTC director Robert Townsend, Choir Club is in the process of merging with the Theatre Company in hopes of extending their outreach on campus.

“There’s so much overlap between amazing singers and performers in both groups,” Townsend said. “We’re hoping that that will give [Choir] more support, more structure, more credibility on campus, and just have some of our theater students also join that portion of the Theatre Company and sing with them.”

Townsend said he hopes that through choral singing, all Westview performers can experience a sense of unity.

“There is absolutely nothing like singing in a group of people and hitting a tight harmony,” he said. “Vocal music physically affects people. And if it’s beautiful and gorgeous, then people are moved emotionally and auditorially, and so I think the feeling you get when you sing something and sing something in a group is just incredible.”

For performers like trumpet player and new Choir Club member Dain Monahan (11), this holiday event was an opportunity to join this tight-knit singing community.

“Only with the choir do you get harmony parts, and it’s sometimes hard to find a good completely solo instrumental piece that actually sounds good and works, so choir is [unique],” Monahan said. “I just enjoy performing [and] I think it’s just always important to spread Christmas cheer.”

This holiday season, the club plans to participate in more festive performances with the goal of gaining new members, something that president Nicole Pawlicki (12) said the club did not prioritize in past years.

“This year, we’re trying to focus more on formal events so we can hopefully recruit more Westview students [and] do more fun activities,” Pawlicki said. “We are planning to continue our annual tradition of caroling at Christmas Card Lane, [and are also] doing more holiday stuff this season. It’s important to spread the holiday cheer. A lot of people don’t get to hear live carolers often, so it’s nice to perform for them and see the joy on their faces.”

Having renamed the club from Acapella to Choir and changed its singing style this year, the club’s caroling will be different.

“Before, we focused a lot more on barbershop tags and doing maybe one [major] performance, but now we’re trying to move [the club] to be more official,” Terral said. “We’re learning different songs in actual choir parts, and we’re trying to incorporate more styles than just barbershop and choir. For example, ‘My Favorite Things’ [was] theater-style, and the choir carols were kind of jazzy. We’re learning different songs [with different] choir parts, [and] we’re going to have more events like this.”