We were waiting outside the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Homeland before the annual Holiday Brass concert in 2013 when the concept struck: What would an NCAA basketball tournament-type bracket of Christmas carols look like?
We started brainstorming, blurting out song names and deciding where they might be seeded or whether — like so many teams from mid-major conferences each March — their bubble would burst.
Within 24 hours, after a lot of laughter and some debate, our family — my wife, Jeanne; our children, Matt and Katie; and I — had constructed a 32-team field headlined by No. 1 seeds “Joy To The World,” “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “The First Noel” and “The Christmas Song.”
The Smolka Family Christmas Carols Bracket has since become an anticipated holiday tradition, with each matchup voted on by family and friends after the field is revealed on a “selection show” modeled after the CBS “March Madness” standard.
Voting is open for roughly three days per round, with the champion announced on Christmas Eve.
That first year, “Joy To The World” nosed out “O Come All Ye Faithful” for the title. “Joy To The World” repeated the sounding joy with another title in 2014 but lost in the final the next year to “O Holy Night.”
During that first selection show, 13-year-old Matt, wearing a sportcoat and holiday tie in our impromptu kitchen “studio” as the chair of the selection committee, gained newfound respect for the task of the basketball committee each March.
The host of the selection show, who looked a lot like me, grilled Matt: “’Do You Hear What I Hear’ (is) a 4 seed. ‘Little Drummer Boy’ (is) a 3 seed. They played last year, and ‘Do You Hear What I Hear’ won and yet they still are a lower seed. How do you rationalize that?”
Sounding like every basketball selection committee chair ever, Matt said without hesitation that Little Drummer Boy “had a harder schedule,” noting that it had beaten a 1 seed (The First Noel) in the previous year’s tournament.
In college basketball, teams try to build a strong RPI (Ratings Percentage Index) to burnish their tournament profile. In this field, Matt explained, the committee values a strong CPI (Church Popularity Index) or MHI (Mall Hear Index).
After a layoff of a few years, the bracket is back with Katie, an eighth-grader at the School of the Cathedral, succeeding Matt as selection chair.
In a move that generated some heat for the selection committee, the tournament underwent a secular shift this year, with one half of the bracket reserved for non-religious songs and the other side limited to religious songs.
“It’s certainly a different look from when I was the committee chair,” Matt, who attended Loyola Blakefield and is now a freshman at the University of Notre Dame, said on the selection show. This being 2020, he joined via Zoom (albeit from upstairs).
“But I support the idea of giving different genres of songs greater representation in the bracket,” he added. “It’s certainly a big step for the committee to take.”
That resulted in an absolutely loaded South region featuring “O Holy Night,” “Hark The Herald Angels Sing” and “O Come All Ye Faithful” — all former No. 1 seeds.
Katie, fielding another common question of the committee, hinted that expansion could be coming — good news to “Let It Snow” and “Twelve Days of Christmas,” bubble teams who could only hope for a Christmas carols NIT (National Invitational Tournament in college basketball parlance) somewhere.
At Christmas Eve Mass a few years ago, it became evident how much the bracket has become part of our holiday season. In the sanctity of the Mass, Jeanne — a former college basketball player at Johns Hopkins University —nudged me with her elbow as she pointed to a song in the hymnal.
“Hey,” she whispered, “did they make the bracket?”
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