Church Christmas Festival To Be Aired in High Definition on WCBI

TUPELO,Miss. (WCBI) — For the first time ever an annual Church Christmas festival aired on WCBI will be broadcast in High Definition. And it promises to be an unforgettable performance.

It takes six months of planning and preparation. And it involves more than three hundred members of Tupelo’s Harrisburg Baptist Church to put it on. The fifteenth annual North Mississippi Christmas Festival, which is the brainchild of Minister of Music Aaron Tomes who has organized the event since it’s inception in 2001.

“The whole purpose of the broadcast and presenting the festival to our community is to give God glory at Christmas time,” he says. “We find that Christmas time people’s hearts are more open than perhaps any other time of the year to the message of Jesus Christ. In fact the title of our program this year is “Gloria” and the whole aim of our festival this is to give God back the glory that’s due his name,” Tomes points out.

James Tidwell is a member of the Harrisburg Sanctuary Choir.

“It takes a ton of hard work many hours that we put in, especially the last week,” he explains. “Some nights we’re here for three hours working and singing and checking notes and getting words right and trying to cram all this into your brain, sometimes it’s not too easy but we seem to get it before the end,” Tidwell notes.

And the North Mississippi Christmas Festival involves young people including members of Harrisburg’s Zamar student choir. Taylor Fikes is a Senior of at Tupelo High School.

“It’s an awesome opportunity for me to just be a part of something so big and such a ministry that God can use and the small part that I play in the message that we get to bring every night, it’s a blessing,” she says.

And this is an international production. “Cern” is an exchange student from Thailand and a member of the Zamar choir.

“It’s really fun because I never really knew what a Christmas festival looked like and how it’s done and so it’s really fascinating to me,” according to Cern.

For the first time ever the North Mississippi Christmas Festival will be broadcast in High Definition on My Mississippi and WCBI. Mark Clayton directs the broadcast.

“It’s rewarding to be a part of such a great team of individuals who work so hard to bring together the song the drama and even the technical aspect that we’re involved with,” he says. “The best video from each night will be put together and compiled for the finished broadcast that will be aired on WCBI,” Clayton explains.
And the festival broadcasts will be on

MYMS
December 22 5:30 pm
December 23 5:30 pm
December 24 9:00 pm
December 25 2:00 pm
WCBI
December 24 11:00 pm
December 25 5:00 am and 4:00 pm.