Hot Chocolatemilk and lots of warming songs

The choir I joined this year traditionally sings downtown for a good cause: "Noot voor Nood" (note for need). All across Belgium choirs team up to sing in the middle of the Christmas frenzy and collect money for a child cancer fund.

During the rehearsal last Wednesday a list was passed along with 2 colums: "will attend" and "hot drink". I figured that it'd be a quite cold day out, so I was glad I could sign up for getting a warm drink and I put 2 crosses.
Afterwards they came to thank me that I was going to help cooking hot chocolatemilk and I was asked how much I could bring. I must admit I was totally stunned that I had myself somehow gotten into chocolatemilk duty and I stumbled "2 liters". The next day I realised my thermos did not have the capacity for 2 liters at all. So I ended up buying a new thermos.

This noon Jan helped my cooking the chocolate milk, since due my dislike of chocolate it would risk being very very weak. But he threw in extra real chocolate and vanilla sugar and I am was confident I had the best hot chocolate milk in town.

A little bit nervous because I hardly knew half of the songs (most of them are 'common knowledge' among the choir members, hence they were rehearsed very quickly), I bundled up as if I was going to a pole expedition and I joined the others downtown. All decorated with red Christmas heads we started singing and soon enough the people stopped and formed half a circle to listen to us for a while before they went on on their Christmasshopping. Only some boyfriends felt obliged to stay much longer until they were freezing as well. I kept myself as close as I could next to the other soprano's and when I wasn't to sure about myself I looked down at my papers closely, which resulted in hiding my mouth in my scarf, masking my mumbling :p. But some ex-choir members joined along as well as some sympathisants, so I was not the only one improvising along :D.

After more than an hour we were more than happy to stamp our feet and warm up our fingers and throats with the hot hot chocolate. Even I enjoyed my cup.

The second hour went by much faster, much smoother and by the end I really started to know how to sing/improvise along the songs. Nevertheless I was very happy to relief my frozen feet by the end of our concert! Boy did they hurt when we started walking home! note to myself: put 2-3 pairs of socks on next year!