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 to CITAM Ngong, the Cantata offers something he said is increasingly rare.
“At concerts, you clap and leave,” he reflected. “Here, you stay. You sit with the message. My son doesn’t say much, but afterwards he asked questions. That’s how I know something landed.”
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 is not what is missing, but what is different. Audiences 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 when the first note is sung. It begins weeks earlier.
It begins with rehearsals squeezed between work, school, traffic, and life. With children learning to wait for their turn, adults choosing commitment over convenience, and sound checks 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 already outgrown. Fans hum overhead, warming the room.
Backstage, a mother adjusting her daughter’s costume whispered encouragement.
“She’s nervous,” she said 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 it is the year Kenyans have lived: rising costs, uncertainty, exhaustion, and quiet griefs carried privately.
Perhaps it is the knowledge that some faces are missing from the pews. Or the collective fatigue of a nation that has had to be resilient for too long.
When the choir sings “Usiku mtakatifu…”, some eyes close. Others glisten. You can tell who has had a hard year by how still they become.
In Kenyan Cantatas, children are never just decoration.
They are angels with crooked halos, shepherds forgetting lines, stars wobbling on tinsel strings. Parents lean forward, phones raised, whispering encouragement.
Beyond the cuteness, something deeper unfolds.
“I like being an angel,” said eight-year-old W, clutching a bent halo after the performance. “Even when I forget, my friend helps me. We practice together.”
Children are being inducted into collective memory. They learn that Christmas is something prepared for, not downloaded. That it requires patience, practice and participation. They learn courage, standing before a crowd. They learn belonging, being part of something larger than themselves.
Long after the costumes are folded away, those lessons remain.
What the audience sees is the final performance. What they do not see are the unseen contributions: choir members pooling fare, volunteers adjusting lights, someone sewing a missing costume button, another quietly mentoring a nervous child backstage.
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 that money cannot manufacture. The Cantata runs on shared ownership.
A different kind of climax
In entertainment spaces, climax is measured in volume. Louder music. Brighter lights. Bigger applause.
In a Cantata, the climax is often silence.
That moment after the final chorus when no one rushes to leave. When people remain seated, absorbing what has passed through them. When applause feels secondary to reflection.
The Cantata does not fix what is broken. What it offers is grounding. A reminder that even in uncertain times, we still know how to gather. How to rehearse hope. How to sing a story that insists: even here, even now.
For Rev Jotham Munene of CITAM Ngong, the Cantata’s endurance is not accidental.
“People are hungry for meaning, and sometimes, meaning enters more easily through music than through words,” he said.