How about Hell for Xmas?
A scene from my drumming days, playing with a 20-ish-piece community stage band / orchestra:
The gig was outdoors, in the waning evening hours in late November, for a public Xmas tree lighting on the town square. The "bandstand" was a flatbed 18-wheeler trailer, which left everyone on it sitting about 5 feet off the ground, with no usable shelter from the temperatures in the low 40s, and a driving winter wind which put the windchill temperatures somewhere around negative-infinite-go-to-h3ll degrees. The black & white quasi-uniform dress of a traditional stage band was rendered moot by the fact that everyone had decided to keep their winter coats and hats on, in all the variety of colors and textures that involved. All save for your humble correspondent, that is, who typically drummed in a dress shirt and tie, having left off the suit jacket for better flexibility of my arms behind the drum set.
We got a few minutes to tune and "warm up" (ha...) once we were all in place on the trailer, but because of the season, and especially because it's the South, OF COURSE there had to be "a word of prayer" before anything could start. So the mayor stepped up to the mic, welcomed the bundled-up masses huddled together in the square, and with a quick glance around the crowd to find a familiar man of the cloth, invited Revered So-and-So out of the crowd to lead the assembly in a mandatory appeal to the Power Invisible.
Well, what no one knew - until far too late - was that poor Reverend So-and-So had very recently suffered the devastating loss of his aged, and much beloved, mother. What should have been a few seconds of polite bow-your-heads-and-get-on-with-it turned into a personal soliloquy on a whole range of topics; The holidays, the significance of family, maternal love and care, and how the bereaved reverend's mother had been the saintly glue that held his whole world together, etc. etc.
Now, plenty of us on that traile- excuse me, bandstand - had been through similar losses, so we were not without sympathy for the poor man. He'd come out with the rest of the town just to see a big tree lit up, only to have an ignorant politicrat twit pick him out of the crowd and put him on a very public spot, at what must surely have been one of the weakest and most vulnerable times in his entire life. But it was too late now; He'd been handed a microphone, and what kind of heartless b@st@rd was going to jump in and cut him off as he reminisced about his recently-departed mother?
So we were stuck. All of us. The band, the mayor, his flacks, and a square full of townspeople, all shivering in the driving wind, all watching the sun descend below the trees, and feeling the temperature go down along with it. And here, on this night, as we entered into The Most Sacred Of Seasons, the Holy Spirit so moved the reverend that his speech turned into a rolling sermon, with no clear indicator of when it would end, or the program we'd all come there for would get under way.
About 5 minutes in, the band all started to look around at each other, and to the conductor, who was as helpless as the rest of us. The brass held their hands over their mouthpieces, trying to keep them warm, occasionally bringing them to their mouths for a moment to blow as discretely and quietly as they could through their horns, in an increasingly futile effort to keep warm air inside them. The woodwinds tried to keep their reeds wet and at the ready, but in the dry winter air, and that never-ending wind, there was little hope of that. The conductor stayed on his podium in front of us, hands at the ready to launch into the first joyful bars of "Deck The Halls."
10 minutes into the preacher's remarks, he found a thematic motif, returning over and over again to the old adage of how one is known by "the comp'ny you keep," admonishing the crowd to live up to the example set by his own dear Mama. The sermon began self-steering into an outright eulogy. Still trapped on the bandstand, the horns and reeds tried to keep warm. I signaled as subtly as I could to Mrs. Winslow to hand me my suit jacket. From the front of the trailer, it must have looked pretty funny to see the cuff of a black jacket levitate upward behind the drummer, lifted by an unseen hand. Once I had the jacket back on, I resorted to tucking my hands as deeply as I could into my armpits, trying to keep some flexibility - nay, feeling - in my fingers, hoping my sticks wouldn't go flying as soon as we got a downbeat (whenever that was going to be).
At 15 minutes, the preacher began weeping as he spoke. Again and again, he tearfully extolled the virtues of kindness, patience, love, and care, outlining examples of every single one these qualities with a story from his own upbringing, guided by the good Christian woman who had borne him into this Earthly world. Our conductor, at this point, had given up. He stayed on the podium, but his hands were now jammed into the pockets of his coat.
Around the 20-minute mark, the preacher's weeping turned into open, uncontrollable blubbering, the memories pouring forth from his broken heart, with his heaving sobs amplified by the town's booming PA. Every choking catch of his breath, sniffle, and snort echoed up and down the length and breadth of Main Street, and into the surrounding blocks. The sun was long gone, leaving the wind to continue its brutal work on everyone standing out in the frigid square.
Finally, after 30 agonizing minutes, the emotional meltdown taking place in front of us seemed to run out of fuel. The preacher's thoughts wandered a bit, then finally, found their way back to the reason he'd been asked up there in the first place:
"And so... I'd like to ask everyone to bow their heads in prayer... um... again." (It was supposed to have been a prayer, after all.)
The conductor looked at the shivering band in front of him, and raised his equally shivering hands out of his pockets. The horns and woodwinds put their freezing-cold horns to their lips, every one of us knowing that any warmup - not to mention tuning - that had been done half an hour ago was now thoroughly shot to Hades by the lowering temperatures. I took up my drumsticks with fingers that could no longer feel them.
"...in the Name of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ... Amen."
The conductor looked both relieved to be starting the show, yet deeply apprehensive about the sound that was about to greet him.
"One, two!"
Friends, we did not make a joyful noise. In all candor, it was utterly horrid, and we knew it. But we had a set of a dozen Xmas songs to do, so we were going to do them anyway. After a couple of tunes to get everyone as warmed back up as we could be, the conductor did a quick tuning check between numbers to get us somewhere back in the neighborhood of passable. Once the set was done, we packed up as fast as we could.
It was the last outdoor show we ever agreed to play in the winter. The following year, the town lit its tree to a CD.
The 40's were with the Sun, of course. Everything started dropping like a rock as we lost that. Heck, in the drumming days, especially after hauling all that gear and setting it up, I'd have considered such temps free AC. But that blasted wind made it another matter entirely. Doubly so for the horns. Lots of reeds and lips wound up cracked that night.
Actually, I found it amusing to read again since it was a lesson well learned: 
