Quincy carolers kick off Christmas show across multiple communities

QUINCY, Mass. — Some play guitar, a few shake tambourines, and all join in the holiday tradition of caroling.

“We all met at Quincy City Hospital many years ago, and we became life-long friends,” said group organizer Rose Cristiani Pope. “We go to the veteran’s hospital. We’ve gone to memory care units. We’ve gone to nursing homes, assisted living.”

But last year, for the first time in more than twenty years, the group of carolers went nowhere -- heeding warnings from health authorities about the dangers of spreading COVID through song.

“This year came, and we didn’t think we were gonna be able to carol,” Cristiani Pope said. “But we were able to put something together.”

That ‘something’ consisted of a roving bus of carolers that made selective stops Sunday night because, Cristiani Pope said, this seemed a year when Christmas cheer was especially needed.

The group first stopped at the Norwood home of Anthony Grasso, a World War Two veteran. He was not only serenaded with “Jingle Bells,” but also “God Bless America.”

“Couldn’t be any better,” Grasso said. “The most wonderful thing in my life today.”

Next up was a visit with a veteran of a different kind -- five-year-old Quinn Waters, who was diagnosed in February 2019 with medulloblastoma, a type of brain cancer.

Water’s battle with cancer earned him the nickname “The Mighty Quinn” after the song Bob Dylan wrote, and Manfred Mann made famous in 1968.

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Quinn became well-known for living in isolation before it became something many did because of COVID. The boy was forced to stay inside his Weymouth home for months because cancer treatment weakened his immune system.

While Quinn recovered from his first bout with cancer, doctors found additional tumors earlier this year. He’s undergone radiation treatment at Children’s Hospital, said Tara Waters, Quinn’s Mom.

“Quinn’s doing well,” she said. “Currently, all the tumors he had been stable. The size that they’re at. Which is extremely minimal.”

As they have been doing pretty much since Quinn began treatment, the Waters again made an appeal for blood donations to Children’s Hospital -- especially now, when COVID has kept the public from visiting blood banks.

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“Treatment itself is hard enough, but it’s especially hard at the holidays being stuck in the hospital,” she said. “So if people could get out and donate blood and platelets, that would help get those kids strong enough to possibly make it home in time to celebrate Christmas with their families.”

Cristiani Pope said in the past carolers would get around from spot to spot by trolley, trailer -- even by horse and buggy.

In the haste to put something together this season, the group rented a bus. Outside the John the Baptist Church in Quincy, it temporarily got stuck as the driver tried to squeeze into a parking lot entrance-- an SUV narrowing his options on one side, a wrought iron fence on the other.

Eventually, he made it through, and the carolers hopped off to serenade sisters at a nearby convent -- COVID indirectly delaying the stop -- but not stopping it.

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