The Girls from St Josephs Girls Secondary School Transition Year Class, will be singing the wonderful "Stille Nacht" or Silent Night as we know it , which was written by Joseph Mohr (details below. ).

The event at the Mayo Peace Park will start at 2.30pm on Christmas Eve, 24 Dec 2014, with a novel football game. Music and Song at 3pm by the Legendary Piper Pat Conlon, Castlebar Town Marching Band, the Girls from St Joseph's Secondary School, The Castlebar Mens Shed. Everyone is invited to come along and join in with the Carol Singing in what is going to be a unique community celebration.

It was December 24th, 1818, in a small Austrian village called Oberndorf, just hours before Christmas mass and pastor Joseph Mohr was in a bind. His musical plans for the evening church service were ruined since the organ of his church (St. Nicholas Kirche) had broken down due to a recent flooding of the nearby river. What could he do? In a moment of inspiration, he grabbed a Christmas poem he had written two years earlier and quickly set off to the neighbouring village, where his friend Franz Gruber, the church organist, lived.

It is believed that Franz Gruber was able to produce on that night in just a few short hours, the first version of the world renowned Christmas hymn "Stille Nacht", written as a guitar accompaniment. The song that we sing today is slightly different from the original version - it is believed that folk singer and choir groups altered the original melody slightly as they performed the carol throughout Europe in the ensuing decades. (See Stille Nacht complete with an English translation for the original Stille Nacht version.) The English version we know today was written by the Episcopal priest John Freeman Young, however the standard English version contains just three verses, whereas the German version contains six. (only verses 1, 6 and 2 from the original Joseph Mohr version are sung in English.)