Vocal ensemble adds old-fashioned seasonal cheer to chamber’s Stroll

It’s hard to imagine the holiday season without carolers serenading the community. For the first time this year, Oyster Bay Holiday Stroll featured a group of professional singers.

To prepare for the first post-pandemic Stroll, the Oyster Bay-East Norwich Chamber of Commerce contacted local business owners and organization directors, asking if anyone knew any professional singers. Amy Reilly Hanley, the chamber’s executive director, explained that the organization wanted to have carolers out and about to evoke a sense of old-fashioned holiday cheer.

“We thought it’d be really cool if we had some people who are walking around and singing,” Reilly Hanley said. “It just seemed like a great way to add to the sense of holiday spirit.”

The chamber included Harriet Clark, executive director of Raynham Hall Museum, in the email blast, and Clark recommended the museum’s head of visitor services, Christopher Judge. Judge has been a member of the choir at Christ Church in Oyster Bay for the past 13 years, singing baritone. Christ Church was famously where President Theodore Roosevelt and his family worshiped.

After talking with Reilly Hanley, Judge offered to put together a team of choralists to sing Christmas carols and popular holiday songs during the Stroll. He ultimately recruited four other vocalists for the event, three of them fellow members of the Christ Church choir and another a recent graduate student at Long Island University Post.

The squad of carolers hitched a ride on a hay tractor operated by Wonderland Tree Care + Landscape, a local arborist and tree surgeon. Judge said that by alternating between traditional holiday hymns and modern songs, such as “Frosty the Snowman,” the group wanted to entertain as wide-ranging an audience as possible. He made the most of his museum experience as well, offering snippets of a historical tour whenever his fellow carolers needed a break.

“We had a nice range of different types of people, young and old, who just absolutely loved it,” Judge said. “They got to experience the ride, sing or clap along with the music, and hear a little bit of the local history.”

Judge, along with bass Brandon Allen, alto Michelle Parsinski, tenor Sian Piret and soprano Elisa Dragotto, rode in the tractor for several hours, and performed at several stops around town. Over the course of the Stroll, they stopped outside Raynham Hall, at the bandstand, at the Fire Department and finally the store James Guy.

The group also collecting over $100 in donations for a Christ Church initiative called St. Hilda’s Guild, an outreach group comprising the church’s female parishioners, who organize fundraising projects and donate to local charities.

Dragotto, a resident of Mill Neck, said that singing traditional music not only adds to the ambience of such an event, but also reminds people of the essence of the holiday season.

“People are used to going into the city for really good music, but there’s quite a lot happening here in Oyster Bay,” Dragotto said. “I think the community can benefit from hearing some that sounds new and different, which is actually quite old.”