“Come in and know me better, man!” Thus, the ghost of Christmas Present greets Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge in the timeless classic A Christmas Carol. The ghost of Christmas Present, characterized by abundance, warmth, mirth, and welcome, reminds us of our best Christmases. These things about Christmas that we love most can all find fulfillment in art and hospitality. So, it follows that Christmas house concerts fit in this Christmas season like the star atop the tree.

Porchlight Christmas Show Season

This month, across the country—from Rochester, NY down to Richmond, TX, back up to San Diego, CA, and many places in between—Porchlight hosts are holding Porchlight Christmas concerts. For some, this represents the first event of the Christmas season. For others, a welcome respite from the hubbub of holiday shopping and planning. The temptation to lose oneself in either isolation or consumerism tightens its grip each passing year, with its highest potency felt during the holidays. 

Year-round, Renew the Arts’ Porchlight initiative serves to help people push back against the divisive, alienating tendencies in their own communities through the power of the arts. Through the disarming nature of the Christmas party and the unifying virtue of classic carols, the Porchlight Christmas concert provides an even more accessible entry for strangers and neighbors alike.  

The Dubois’ Porchlight Christmas Open House

Bryan and Karen DuBois decided to host one such Christmas concert this year, adding a twist to the typical event: a two-day open house last weekend with a concert by Carly Taich as grand finale. The motto of the weekend: “Drop by when you can.” “It’s unlike a Christmas party where you get thirty people there elbow to elbow with all this raucous noise for a couple of hours, and everyone saying nice platitudes,” Bryan explained. “In a multi-day thing, you might have ten people all at once, or two, three, or one. And then you can have conversations that no one really has during the year.” 

And the event produced connection. When one guest expressed a desire to chat with Bryan more, Bryan invited him back over to the house on Monday. A family who stopped by on Saturday morning made a point to come back in the evening for Carly’s show. 

This was the third concert the DuBois’ have hosted, and their second welcoming Carly Taich. Carly, fresh from the success of her own Kickstarter fundraiser, sang two Christmas songs of her own before launching into a singalong of familiar carols with her husband and a friend. “She would tell a story and then someone else would have an anecdote, so it wasn’t just one-way with a sole entertainer,” Karen recalled. “And because we all sang together, it felt natural for other people to share their stories, too.” 

Though not everyone they invited made an appearance, the invitations themselves also serve to create a different community environment. “That pattern [of invitation and welcome], in the long run, is just what it takes… It takes time for them to know who were are, and being asked multiple times and kind of watching other people do it before someone will step in.” 

Bryan and Karen have been opening their home for years and have every intention to keep welcoming folks in.

The Gift of Porchlight

This is what Christmas does. Our hearts, reacquainted both with the magic of the Christmas ideal and all the ways we imperfectly strive to meet it, inspire us to carry that higher spirit throughout the rest of the year. Christmas should not stop on December 25. The life of Jesus didn’t. His cradle points to His ministry, His cross, His resurrection, and His promise to come again. 

In parallel, Porchlight Christmas concerts culminate a momentum that builds all year long: gathering both kin and stranger into our homes to be drawn together around something Good, True, and Beautiful. That’s the spirit of the Porchlight network, and with your generosity, we aim to keep it happening for years to come.

If hosting a Porchlight Christmas Concert (or a house concert anytime during 2023) interests you, you can start by signing up as a host here. In the meantime, we invite you to help us keep Porchlight around into 2023 and another Christmas season. You can either start your own fundraiser here or donate directly to sustain a growing network of artists and hosts connecting and serving their communities in the spirit of radical generosity and Christ-like welcome. 

“Come in and know me better, man!”, the anthem of hospitality, invites us to know and be known. It extends an olive branch in a weary world aching to rejoice for something much more than unwrapped presents, time off from work, and the usual holiday trimmings. It asserts abundance despite the reality of need, good tidings of great joy with carols in the wings. And, suddenly, those old songs mean more when we sing them together. We realize that they were never meant to be sung alone.