I do not have a great singing voice. I do not even have a good singing voice. My singing voice is the vocal equivalent of a lopsided gingerbread house made out of crackers. Every holiday season, I join a choir somewhere and immediately worry that the person in front of me will turn around, hear whatever sound just escaped my mouth, and think, “Gawd, who let her in?”
And yet, I love singing at Christmas. I love the communal lift of it. I love the way a room of humans can accidentally produce something halfway beautiful while half of them are panicking about whether they are the ones ruining it. Every year, I promise myself that this time I will relax, open my mouth, and not imagine a panel of judges hiding behind the poinsettias.
Which is how I fell in love with a Portuguese word that feels like a holiday miracle. Muvuca.
On my podcast, “Fifty Words for Snow,” my Welsh cohost Emily John Garcés and I search for unusual and valuable words from around the world. This week, we found muvuca, a word that describes people coming together to create sound for fun. Not for a performance. Not for money. Not because they are trained musicians. Muvuca is what happens when humans gather and make celebratory noise without worrying what they sound like.
Our Argentinian guest, Kika Mousse, explained that muvuca is essentially the holy racket that erupts when people decide joy is enough of a reason to make noise. No auditions. No hierarchy. No one barking instructions to blend or blend better. She once hosted an event with 20 singers, none professionally trained, and the beauty lay not in the harmony, but in the freedom. Everyone simply added their sound to the whole.
Kika also told us about traveling in Kenya, where she discovered the same instinct in people there. In markets, on buses, or even in hospitals, someone would start a song, and others would join in. She went in for surgery once, and when the doctor asked if she had any last requests before anesthesia, she said, “Yes, I want you to sing.” He offered to play a song on YouTube, but she refused. She wanted real voices, so she began a simple call-and-response tune. One by one, the entire surgical team joined in. She drifted into unconsciousness inside a spontaneous chorus of strangers.
That story lodged itself in me. I could not stop picturing the sheer trust of it, the comfort of being held by other people’s imperfect voices.
Meanwhile, here at home, we have created a culture where excellence is often the price of admission — as if joy itself needs an audition tape. I have heard more apologies from people holding guitars at holiday parties than actual songs. Before anyone strums a chord, they are already saying “sorry” for not being better. It is like fun has a prerequisite.
Muvuca offers another way.
It reminds us that celebration is not meant to be curated. It is meant to be lived. It is messy and noisy and gloriously human. It is banging a pot because you feel like it. It is clapping on the wrong beat. It is singing bravely even when the note you hit was not invited.
It also makes me hear an old line in a new way. Make a joyful noise unto the Lord. I grew up hearing that as an instruction. Lately, it feels more like permission. You are allowed to make a noise. It does not need to be pretty. Joyful is enough.
So this holiday season, I suggest an experiment. Gather a few friends or family members. Bring a pot, a guitar, or just your hands. Step into the cold air and declare it a muvuca.
There is no wrong note. There is no expert in charge.
There is only the simple, ancient pleasure of making sound together, especially when you are not good at it.