 I like all the illers out there. Welcome. I just want to get us started here. My name is Kara Almasarawi. I'm the director of the tertiary marketplace and it feels so good to welcome people back to the marketplace. We missed you last year, so thank you for being here. Hope you all enjoy the lights. I'm about to pass it off to my boss, the mayor, but I just want to make a quick plug that if you didn't know, 91% of our retail and restaurant businesses in Burlington are locally owned. Please keep those dollars in town and I hope you have a great weekend and a good holiday and I'm just handed off to Mayor Murrow Weinberger. Thank you. Good evening everyone. It is, let me repeat Kara's point. It is so exciting to have you all with us here at the top of Church Street once again. I want to thank Kara and her very small team that makes magic happen here on Church Street throughout the year and especially during the holiday period. And I really just want to welcome you all in from around the state. It is so exciting to have 14 of the state's top choirs here with us. I understand there's still competition ahead, so good luck to you all. And with that, and I do want to also say while you're here, we do hope you take advantage of everything Burlington has to offer. This is more important time than ever to support local merchants after everything that they've all been through over the last couple of years. Hope you'll do that before heading home. And with that, I am going to hand this mic over to Amy Bushey, who is the Coral Director and Staff Burlington. And he's been helping to plan and coordinate this whole event. Amy, good luck. Thanks. Thank you, Mayor Weinberger. And we are so excited to be here singing for you tonight. And if you know the tunes by all means, please feel free to sing along with us. Just a couple words of thank you before we begin in earnest. I want to thank my colleagues. This has been an incredible journey over the last two years, not being allowed to sing last year to where we are right now. So to each one of my colleagues and their amazing students, thank you for your patience. Thank you for your perseverance. And thank you for being here tonight. Thank you to your families and your parents for also supporting you throughout this last two years. Thank you to the Vermont Chapter of the American Coral Directors Association for helping to sponsor this event. I think this is our 40th year doing this. And this is the first time we've done it in the open air. So this is pretty exciting. Yeah. Thank you to the City of Burlington and certainly to the staff of the marketplace. You guys, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for celebrating our students and celebrating this beautiful art. And we just can't appreciate you nearly enough. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I think that's it. I'm certain I've forgotten somebody. Thanks, kids. Again. And you know what? Here we go. My friend Carl Rekia is going to lead us in a couple of songs. Hi, folks. The mayor is a little bit incorrect about the competition part. Madrigal Festival has never been that. We've, in traditional days, we've been able to hear each other, schools from throughout the state. And that's been wonderful for us as directors and also kids to hear what other groups are doing. Today they just came into St. Joseph's and performed basically for me and a videographer. And I gave them critique, which was lovely. It was great, grand and fun. So we are going to sing Carol of the Bells and then we're going to sing Deck the Hall. And if you all sing with us, it'll make it go a lot better. Trust me. And it'd be really nice because of the breeze if we could do this right the first time. But, you know, we got a whole pile of choral directors here and what we like to do is practice. So if it's not good, well, you know, okay. Point, if you'd like to follow, we're going to spread out through the marketplace and give our little secondary performance. So come shop, come eat, get some warm drinks, something to drink, and we're going to sing some more for you. Thanks for being here.