Lighting Ceremony and Carolling
The tree lighting ceremony in Trafalgar Square takes place on the first Thursday in December and is attended by thousands of people. The ceremony, led by the Lord Mayor of Westminster, includes a band and choir followed by the lighting of the tree with the flick of a switch.
Traditionally, the tree provides a focal point for Christmas carolling groups. For many in London, the tree and the accompanying carolling signals the countdown to Christmas.
In December 2010, Lewisham Choral Society were one choir who sang for charity, in this case for The Royal London Society for the Blind.
Since 2009, the Poetry Society has commissioned new poems annually for display on banners around the base of the tree. In 2010 schoolchildren also performed one of poems at the lighting-up ceremony.
Read more about this topic: Trafalgar Square Christmas Tree
Famous quotes containing the words lighting and/or ceremony:
“Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of “quaint,” and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dynamic element which is cinematising the events of the canvas, translating a posture or ceremony into dynamic terms. The greatest movie of the 20th century is the Mona Lisa, just as the greatest novel is Gray’s Anatomy.”
—J.G. (James Graham)