Every year around this time, I am given to a memory that touches me. Though it has never be written about and may never be, the Christmas I spent with Carmen Monarcha as she traveled through Europe singing the season's most inspirational music ever written was a time that moved my soul into a whole new territory of the soul, a place where, well, where souls go and feel better than they did before they went there. In the video below, as she sings Bach's Ave Maria, look closely into the orchestra scene behind her and you will find me, sitting with an instrument, which I was pretending to play, adoring Carmen's backside as she performed. By the way, I still don't know which Maria she is singing about, do you?