Holiday 2025 Challenge
🎄Holiday 2025 Challenge
The holidays can be a whirlwind, but they also offer a beautiful opportunity to slow down, reconnect with your voice, and share music in a spirit of joy and generosity. Our tonebase Voice Holiday 2025 Challenge is designed to bring a sense of grounding, creativity, and community into a busy season—through small, meaningful prompts that fit easily into real life. Whether you’re singing between gatherings, carving out a few quiet minutes for yourself, or simply looking to stay inspired, we’re so glad you’re here. Let’s celebrate the season together, one mindful musical moment at a time.
Two Weeks · Six Activities · One Stronger Voice
Celebrate the season by grounding your technique, reconnecting with artistry, and sharing your voice with the tonebase community. Each prompt is designed to be short, doable, and meaningful, even in the middle of holiday chaos.
Participants post inside the tonebase forum using video or audio (or text, if preferred).
WEEK 1 — “Warmth & Foundation”
Focus: Breath, resonance, and ease during a busy season.
🔹 Activity 1 — Holiday Breath Reset
Task: Share a 30–60 second video showing your favorite calming breath exercise (e.g., silent inhale, straw breathing, low-release exhale).
Prompt: How do you reset your system when life feels hectic?
Goal: Reduce tension and create space for efficient holiday singing.
🔹 Activity 2 — One-Line Resonance Check
Task: Pick one line of a seasonal song or aria (carol, hymn, art song, whatever you love) and record it using a simple resonance check: hum ➝ vowel ➝ text.
Prompt: What changed when you prioritized vibration over volume?
Goal: Reconnect with forward resonance and sensation-based singing.
🔹 Activity 3 — “Gift Yourself” Practice Moment
Task: Share a 1-minute clip of a mindful practice moment — scales, sirens, or a gentle warm-up that feels nourishing.
Prompt: What micro-habit are you committing to this season to stay vocally grounded?
Goal: Build consistency through small, sustainable actions.
WEEK 2 — “Joy & Expression”
Focus: Interpretation, storytelling, and artistic play.
🔹 Activity 4 — Lyric Connection Spotlight
Task: Speak (not sing) 4–6 lines from a winter or holiday text, focusing on meaning, color, and emotional intention.
Prompt: What word or phrase revealed something new when you spoke it aloud?
Goal: Strengthen interpretive clarity before adding vocal complexity.
🔹 Activity 5 — Festive Phrase Challenge
Task: Sing a single phrase from any seasonal repertoire and experiment with one interpretive choice: dynamic shape, articulation, tempo play, or color.
Prompt: What artistic risk did you take? How did it change the musical moment?
Goal: Explore expressive freedom without pressure to “perfect.”
🔹 Activity 6 — Community Carols / Holiday Sharing
Task: Post a short clip (15–60 sec) of a holiday song, lullaby, hymn, or winter piece you love — sung casually, even in pajamas.
Prompt: Tell us why this piece matters to you.
Goal: Celebrate community, connection, and seasonal joy.
As we bring this Holiday Challenge to a close, take a moment to honor the small steps, gentle check-ins, and creative sparks you cultivated over these two weeks. Even in the busiest season, you showed up for your voice—and that matters. We hope these prompts brought you connection, clarity, and a little extra light. Keep singing, keep sharing, and know that your tonebase Voice community is here cheering you on as you carry this momentum into the new year.
20 replies
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Activity 1: My favorite calming breath exercise is 4:8 breathing (I use it in my evening gentle stretching classes). It's a 4 second inhale with an 8 second exhale, exhaling either with mouth soft or open. This encourages calm and peacefulness (activates the parasympathetic nervous system). https://youtu.be/uJmmTDuTX2o
I have some specific postures which, combined with breathing, are wonderful to reset when life feels hectic. One of them I call lazy starfish: lie down (prone) with a bolster or firm pillow in a comfortable place under hips/lower abdomen, then relax legs and arms in a "starfish" position while breathing in the 4:8 pattern. Stay for about 3-5 minutes, staying connected to the breath and actively relaxing on the exhale for the first minute or so, then just allow the body to be heavy and soft; when you come up (slowly) out of this posture you'll hopefully feel much more centered and calm.
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Breath Reset : I'm finding that placing my hands over my heart and slowly breathing has been a very grounding experience for me. I was planning on having a relaxing holiday season this year, but I just got a last minute request from a friend to sing in a Christmas concert over the weekend. Although I'm looking forward to singing carols with friends, I'm also realizing the importance of breath exercises ... especially when anxiety tries to creep in! 🙏🏽 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4F_51c7Q5fw
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Activity 2: One Line Resonance Check
My favorite Advent Hymn is O Come Divine Messiah. Here is the first phrase, first with a leaky-tire type "hum", then on a vowel, then with text. This type of series always reminds me to settle into my breath, maintain good support, and to privilege the flow of breath even/especially as words, pitches, etc. change.
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I just realized today that I've been doing the activities but not posting! Here is Activity 4 (I'll add the others over the weekend):
"Life to joy awakes" really popped out when I spoke it; I hadn't really noticed it before. It's quite a striking phrase and describes what we are all waiting for throughout Advent. It added a different dimension to the song for me, and gave me quite the phrase to meditate on.
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Activity 5: What Child Is This? tempo play
At a quicker tempo, this song becomes more like story-telling rather than meditative at a slower tempo; adjusting tempo (swelling, pulling back) throughout the phrase gave it a more conversational tone and allowed for emphasis on certain words. This play encouraged me to sing this at a slighter faster tempo to maintain the feeling of telling a story.
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Activity 6: Little Drummer Boy I remember the first time I heard this piece in my early childhood, and it had a significant impact on me. I identified with the poor drummer boy who just wanted to give what he had to the "newborn King," though it wasn't a "great" gift in the eyes of the world, and this song reminds me of the spirit of Christmas and that the gift of/from ourselves is the most important gift we can give (and my Southern comes out a little bit in this song, too!).
(Heidi, what do you think about creating a page for people to post end of year/beginning of year recordings? I was looking forward to singing for the TB community at the end of the year, but didn't see an opportunity available - we received a notice about an end of the year muliple platform concert, but it didn't seem to include Voice. Thanks for all you do for us here!!)
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"O little town of Bethlehem" is my favourite Christmas carol so that's what I'll be sharing today. This time of year can be very hectic but slowing down and taking part in these reflective practices has been so refreshing! 🎶❤️🎄