On a rainy November evening, Austin Ukulele Society meeting attendees brought out their Christmas sweaters and accessories – and their ukes! – to kick off the holiday season’s merriment in style. After getting settled in with introductions and local ukulele news, Bob led us through our warm-up song: Bob Marley’s ever-optimistic “Three Little Birds.”

We hadn’t yet done a Beach Boys tune at an in-person meeting together, and with our generally mild holiday season in Austin, the Beach Boys + Christmas seemed like a perfect mix! Bob taught us to strum and sing their 1963 classic ‘hot rod rock’ Christmas hit “Little Saint Nick.” This catchy tune gets regular airplay throughout the holiday season, and we had a blast strumming, picking and singing it!

Bob performed his arrangement to get us familiar with the style and tempo. We then dove into the arrangement, with Bob taking us through helpful exercises to learn the chords, chord progressions, strum style, picking options and harmonizing opportunities. Once we got comfortable with the song’s components, we played it through a couple of times and sounded good!

We took a break and enjoyed two terrific open mic performances from Barry and Mia. We’re always so grateful for our participants who share their talents with us!

We then returned to “Little Saint Nick” and after practicing it a bit more, we recorded ourselves playing it. Look for the video coming soon to our YouTube channel. We hope you have as much fun with it as we did! 🙂

To play along with us, you can download the lyrics and chords for Bob’s arrangement of “Little Saint Nick” or download a copy of the presentation and instruction guide (what we project on the screen for all to follow along, including exercises and drills).

Many thanks to the great team that makes our meetings possible: Bob, Jen, Lyda, Lori, Jodi, and Jana – and helpers like Barry and Jay! As always, we owe a shout out to Aaron Lewis for keeping us on the beat with his u-bass!

We look forward to “seeing” our global uke community at the virtual holiday strum-along on Thursday, December 7th and the annual in-person holiday potluck and strum-along on Thursday, December 14th! 🙂

For more downloadable music, visit our Ukulele Music Library. For more Austin Ukulele Society videos, check out our YouTube Channel.

We appreciate your support and interest. If you’d like to make a donation to the Austin Ukulele Society (a 501(c)(3) organization), visit our Square Donation site. If you would like to be added to our mailing list, please fill out our this short sign-up form. For any other inquiries, please contact us or shoot us an email if you have previous correspondence with us.

Ukulele Society T-shirts!
We are proud to unveil our latest shirt, new for 2023: the “AUS Classic Ukulele,” design, hot off the presses! All of our shirts are thoughtfully designed by the talented Lyda Guz!

The shirts are silk screened here in Austin at a fantastic locally-owned print shop and are available for purchase. The new “AUS Classic Ukulele” design, “Ukulele Around the World,” “10th Anniversary,” Mermaid, Cowboy,” “Austin Lasso” and other shirts are $25. We also have vinyl decals with the AUS logo for $1 each. We can accept cash or a check made out to Austin Ukulele Society; you can also make payment via Venmo or PayPal. Please drop us a line if you’d like to purchase a shirt (or two or three). 🙂 At this time, we can only ship orders within the U.S.