Folks,
There are no midweek services on Wednesday 1st January at 10:30am in St Finnbarr’s or Thursday 2nd January at 6:00pm in St Andrew’s. There is also no Crask service on Saturday 4th January at 5:00pm. Normal service will be resumed thereafter.
Blessings
James
All are welcome to share with us in celebrating Christ’s Birth at any of our services in this part of the world:
Dec 10th – Carols for Christian Aid at Dornoch Cathedral at 7:00pm
Dec 24th – Christmas Midnight Sung Eucharist at St Finnbarr’s at 11:00pm
Dec 25th – Christmas Day Holy Communion from the Reserved Sacrament at St Finnbarr’s at 9:30am
Dec 22nd – Carol Service at St Andrew’s at 3:00pm
Dec 24th – Christmas Midnight Sung Eucharist at St Andrew’s at 11:00pm
Dec 25th – Christmas Day Sung Eucharist at St Andrew’s at 10:30am
Dec 24th – Carol Service at St Columba’s at 5:00pm
Dec 25th – Christmas Day Sung Eucharist at St Columba’s at 9:00am
Dec 25th – Christmas Day Sung Eucharist in Lairg Parish Church at 8:15am
Dec 19th – Monthly Thursday service at the Crask Inn at 12 Noon
Dec 28th – Carols at the Crask Inn at 2:00pm
Dec 17th – Carols at the Hub at 5:30pm
Christmas Carols
St. Andrew’sScottish Episcopal Church
Glebe Crescent, Tain
SUNDAY 22 December
3pm
Followed by Mulled Wine, mince pies & other seasonal refreshments
EVERYONE WELCOME
A programme that you may be interested tomorrow evening (9th December) is:
It is on BBC Four at 9pm.
The blurb on the BBC web site says:
Lucy Worsley reveals that there’s much more to our best-loved carols than meets the eye. She reveals how their stories add up to a special kind of history of Christmas itself. In the ancient past, the wassail, a pagan fertility ritual, gave us door-to-door carol singing. Wassailing was also an integral part of an older midwinter festival that was adopted by Christianity when it came to Britain, and was rebranded as ‘Christmas’.
Religion, however, soon turned its back on carols. They were far too frivolous for the Puritans, who wanted to ban Christmas altogether. In strict Protestant Britain, the carol survived outside the Church and new ones turned up in some surprising places. Lucy visits the British Library, where she discovers an 18th-century children’s book that contains a little memory game called The Twelve Days of Christmas. Christmas carols could also be politically dangerous and subversive.
Eventually, the Church of England couldn’t resist the power of the carol, and finally opened its doors to all of them, thanks to a chance pairing of words and music in Hark the Herald Angels Sing. In the 20th century, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s passion for English folk music took him to the villages of Surrey.
Finally, in the snowy Austrian Alps, Lucy discovers the simple story of a young parish priest with a poem in search of a tune. When he found one, the result was Silent Night. During the First World War, this simple carol would become a hymn for peace during the famous Christmas truce of 1914. Silent Night also reminds us that carols are, and have always been, ‘popular music’, music for the people, fulfilling an enduring need to celebrate and sing together at Christmas.
Copyright BBC
Every day people in the Highlands are struggling to put food on the table. Reasons range from redundancy to receiving an unexpected bill on a low income. Highland Foodbank, part of the work of Blythswood Care, provides a minimum of three days emergency food and support to local people in crisis.
This Reverse Advent Calendar idea is a good way of helping those who are struggling over the winter, by gathering together items that the Food Bank is often short of, day by day throughout Advent.
St Columba’s Episcopal
Church Brora
Service of Rededication
3.00pm on Saturday 28th September
Everyone is most welcome to join us to celebrate the start of this new chapter in the story of St Columba’s which began almost exactly 110 years ago.
The service will be followed by refreshments and marks the reopening of the church for regular worship, after refurbishment following the fire which temporarily closed it in December 2016.
The Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham has been a focus of pilgrimage and devotion since 1922.
We have an intention to establish a ‘local cell’ of The Society of Our Lady of Walsingham in the Diocese of Moray, Ross and Caithness.
Members of the Society are asked to say the Angelus each day.
If you are interested in being part of this exciting new venture, please contact the Rev Simon Scott by email: ihssimonscott@gmail.com or by phone on 01408 633614
Our friends from the Ukraine, the Kyiv Classic Accordion Duo are making their annual visit (their twelfth) to play in St Finnbarr’s on 25th July 2019. The concert starts at 7:30pm and they will be playing music by: Vivaldi, Mozart, Bach, Greig, Saint-Saëns, Borodin, Piazzolla and Anderson. If you’ve not heard them before, here’s a sample: Dance of the Furies by Gluck.
Be sure to put the date in your diaries so that you don’t miss out on the opportunity to hear these two professional musicians conjure up a whole orchestra with just two accordions!! As entry is free but there is a retiring collection and there will be CDs available to purchase. All proceeds, as always will go to the charity Hippokrat, which supports survivors of the Chenobyl Nuclear Disaster.
About the Kyiv Classical Accordion Duo:
In 2006 Igor and Oleksii finished studying in the National Music Academy of Ukraine in Kiev. However they had begun performing professionally in 2002. Oleksii now plays in the Orchestra of the National Radio of Ukraine; Igor works in the National Philharmonic of Ukraine. They decided to give the name Kyiv Duo Classic to the duo, however this doesn’t mean that Igor and Oleksiy perform only classical music; programmes of their concerts include music of Bach, Grieg, Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov as well as traditional Ukrainian and Russian music. Two contemporary button accordions make it possible to produce a sound like a small squeezebox and at the same time, like a big church organ, a string quartet and even an orchestra.
About their charity – HIPPOKRAT:
One of the main purposes of the Kyiv Classic Accordion Duo 2009 UK tour was to raise money for the HIPPOKRAT Society of Mothers of Disabled Children who suffered as a result of the explosion in 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Energy Plant. This has remained the focus of fund-raising on each subsequent tour, as the need continues. The Chernigiv region suffered most from the radiation fall out and since 1986 a large number of children have been born with mental and physical problems. Many of these children are now young adults and in need of support that the state is unable to provide.
As Oleksiy explains:
“There are at least 1000 invalid children in Chernigiv which has a total population of around 320,000 and unfortunately, these children get no real support from the state. The mother of a disabled child usually needs to be with the child all the time, so she cannot earn money. That is why the Society of Mothers of Disabled Children, HIPPOKRAT, was founded more than 15 years ago”.
“The task of HIPPOKRAT is to provide families with invalid children with food, medicine and money. HIPPOKRAT also organises different events and parties with presents for children. It is not a commercial organisation. It is run by 10 women led by Valentina Frol. They do not receive any money for their job and all of them have disabled children”.
It will soon be Summer Holiday Club time again in Lairg.
If you are aged 4-11 or know anyone who is
You can book by emailing Emma at: 
You can also find us on Facebook at: LCTKIDSCLUBS
Scottish Episcopal Church - Dornoch, Lairg, Brora, Tain & Tongue 