Voices not glitter in Nairobi as the Cantata brings Christmas to life

There was a time when Christmas announced itself quietly.

You knew it was coming, not by flashing lights or countdown posters, but by sound. Choirs began rehearsing early, sometimes as far back as October. In the evenings, voices drifted out of church halls, carrying hymns that had been sung for generations.

Children practised lines they did not fully understand, while adults arrived after long days, not for applause, but for tradition.

The Christmas Cantata was not an event. It was a gathering.

“I grew up with the Cantata,” says Margaret Keroka, a long-time choir member who has sung through seasons of joy and loss. “Even when everything else changes, this is the one thing that still feels familiar. You rehearse tired, sometimes discouraged but once you start singing, something settles inside you.”

In recent weeks, Christmas in Nairobi has been impossible to miss. Shopping malls pulse with festive playlists, entertainment joints host themed performances and ticketed concerts promise spectacle, light and celebrity appearances.

Everywhere, Christmas is loud.

Yet beneath the glitter and amplification, something quieter persists. A slower rhythm. A story sung, not sold. A moment when Christmas stops being about consumption and becomes about collective remembering.

That search leads back to the church, where the Cantata still arrives not as a show, but as an experience.

For Peter Ouma, who attended with his teenage son at CITAM Ngong, the Cantata offers something he said is increasingly rare.

“At concerts, you clap and leave,” he reflected. “Here, you stay and absorb the message. My son doesn’t say much during the performance, but afterwards he asked questions. That’s how I know it made an impact.”

The original Cantata was simple. It followed the Biblical narrative: angels, shepherds, a long journey and a child born into uncertainty. There were no LED screens, no choreographed lighting cues, no social media countdowns.

What carried the story was voice.

Voices that cracked, trembled, held faith, fatigue and hope all at once. Today, the Cantata has evolved. It has adapted to time, taste and technology. Churches invest in sound systems, choirs train more formally, costumes are carefully curated, narration is tighter and timing matters.

Yet when done well, its heart remains unchanged. It is still a communal act of storytelling.

“We try to improve the production every year,” said Enos Kioko, a Cantata coordinator. “But we’re always careful not to lose the story. If it ever becomes about performance alone, then we have missed the point.” This season, Christmas performances have spilled far beyond sanctuaries.

At malls, choirs position themselves near escalators, carols competing with tills and chatter. Children pause mid-ice cream to listen.

At entertainment venues, Christmas becomes a themed night: jazz renditions of carols, spoken-word pieces, and live bands reworking familiar melodies.

There is creativity here. Professional polish and skill. There is also something transactional. Applause is expected. Tickets are sold. Performances begin and end on schedule.

What becomes striking about the Cantata is not what is missing, but what is different.

Audiences in entertainment spaces watch, consume, and move on. The Cantata, by contrast, asks you to stay.

“It’s fun and it’s professional,” one performer said after stepping off a mall stage. “But it’s different. Here, people come to watch us. At church, they come to sing with us, even when they don’t.”

At CITAM Ngong, the Cantata does not begin with the first note. It begins weeks earlier. Rehearsals are squeezed between work, school, traffic, and life.

Children learn to wait for their turn, adults choose commitment over convenience and sound checks are interrupted by power fluctuations, quiet frustration and louder laughter. By the time the sanctuary fills, the story has already been lived.

Plastic chairs scrape against tiled floors. Latecomers squeeze in. Children fidget in borrowed jumpers, some too big, some outgrown. Fans hum overhead, warming the room. Backstage, a mother adjusts her daughter’s costume and whispers encouragement. “She’s nervous,” she says softly. “But I want her to learn that fear doesn’t mean you stop. It means you try anyway.

Then the first note rises. Not perfect. Not polished. But unmistakably Christmas. The Cantata tells the same story every year, yet it never sounds the same. This year, the voices carry a different weight, perhaps reflecting the year Kenyans have lived: rising costs, uncertainty, exhaustion and private griefs. Perhaps it is the absence of some faces in the pews or the collective fatigue of a resilient nation.

When the choir sings “Usiku mtakatifu…”, some eyes close. Others glisten. Children are never just decoration, they are angels with crooked halos, shepherds forgetting lines, stars wobbling on tinsel strings. Parents lean forward, whispering encouragement.

What the audience sees is the final performance. What they do not see are choir members pooling fare, volunteers adjusting lights, someone sewing a missing costume button, another quietly mentoring a nervous child. No one is paid. No one is branded. No one is trending. Yet when the final note hangs in the air and the room exhales together, there is a satisfaction money cannot manufacture.

In a Cantata, the climax is often silence. After the final chorus, people remain seated, absorbing what has passed through them, with applause secondary to reflection. The Cantata does not fix what is broken; it grounds, reminding everyone that even in uncertain times, we still know how to gather, rehearse hope, and sing a story that insists: even here, even now.

“People are hungry for meaning, and sometimes, meaning enters more easily through music than words,” said Rev Jotham Munene of CITAM Ngong.