We began playing concerts around the Midwest every December and found that the rooms were usually packed full of people who had bundled in out of the cold with prized compatriots. Folks began snatching up copies and seemed to agree that they hadn’t heard anything quite like it. We played a special “darkest night” release concert on winter solstice in an old 1300-seat theater in Cincinnati. We included a few original tunes and called our wintry mix The Darkest Night Of The Year. In December of 1996 – can it really be over 25 years ago? – we recorded and released our first song cycle of some of the Christmas carols that still haunted us. I don’t think we had considered it at the time, but any young, struggling songwriter is open to the suggestions of the marketplace, and people were persistent. People must have tuned into the radio broadcast, because we began receiving inquiries as to whether we had recorded any of our Christmas songs. It actually felt really good and conjured up an unusual mix of feelings from childhood: innocence, loss, wonder, joy, sadness. We worked up a few carols and traditional tunes and Karin even read a poem by Thomas Hardy called, The Oxen. It was Christmastime and apparently they thought we were up to the task. One December, not long after Over the Rhine began recording and touring, we were invited to perform some seasonal songs on a public radio station in Cincinnati.
