Christmas is getting closer, and the Performing Arts Dept. is getting ready to celebrate the holidays with their annual Holiday Magic show on Dec. 9.

The school has had a Holiday Magic show for the last 11 years, and this year the tradition will continue, though the show will be different than last year’s.

“About one third of the school is part of some type of performing art group,” David Hastings, theater director, said. “It’s an opportunity to come together as a group and celebrate the holidays.”

Holiday Magic is a combined Performing Arts Dept. concert. The wind ensemble, advanced orchestra, the Southside and Chorale choir classes, and the theater musical rep class (one of the school’s top theatre classes) will all participate in Holiday Magic. Each group has a part in the show, and each music group will have a 20 minute performance.

Last year, the Performing Arts Dept. performed Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” with all the groups playing together. This year, however, the show will be divided into blocks with each group coming in after the other.

“The musical rep class will come in first, and introduce the other groups,” Hastings said, “the choirs, then orchestra, then band. At the end, we are all going to play together, like a finale.”

Holiday Magic will be one of the few instances when all performing art groups will work together.

“That doesn’t happen very often,” Lucas Willison, senior, said.

All of the groups involved have been preparing for Holiday Magic for weeks.

“The musical rep class is performing a medley of Broadway holiday songs,” Hastings said, “we studied those musicals ahead of time and picked scenes from them and we are performing a one-minute scene from each of them and the performing a seven-minute medley of the song.”

The musical rep class has been studying these songs in their class for the last month, and will be the narrators during the Holiday Magic show in addition to writing scripts and figuring out where each of their songs will go in relation to introducing all of the pieces.