Patrick Donohue is the proudest Indiana native you're likely to find. Seriously. No one is prouder to be from a state that so many people know relatively so little about than he is. Patrick is a native of Terre Haute and a graduate of the Ernie Pyle School of Journalism at Indiana University. Knowing this, you might think he’d be a huge John "Cougar" Mellencamp fan, a man considered by some to be the Hoosier State's poet laureate. But you'd be wrong. In a major way. | One of my favorite Christmas traditions as a kid was attending Christmas Eve mass.
We were far too young for midnight mass and our family was usually traveling to upstate New York to visit family on Christmas Eve so instead we attended mass around 4 or 5 p.m.
I would sit patiently through the first reading, then the second and the gospel, anxiously counting down the minutes until we would be headed back home to our traditional Christmas Eve dinner, a screening of the animated classic, "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and off to bed.
Of the songs I would hear during that mass, I enjoy none more than "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!" I mean, it's hard not to love a song with not one , but two exclamation points, right?
Not to mention, it was a song used in "A Charlie Brown Christmas," one of my favorite holiday specials.
The version I've selected is by Sufjan Stevens and, for whatever reason, feels like the kind of thing one might hear headed out of mass and back out into the cold, dark winter air.