Carolling brothers spread Christmas cheer in Mill Woods

As snow plows and graders are clearing city streets, a two-wheeled cart is bringing holiday cheer to residents of a southeast Edmonton neighbourhood.

The Caroling Cart, two brothers who love to sing Christmas carols, are performing free concerts to people in Mill Woods for the second year.

It started with a Facebook post last year asking if they could sing for people outside their homes on Christmas Eve.

The response was huge and they gave free concerts in front of more than 120 homes over six days. The brothers say they wanted to help anyone feeling isolated due to the pandemic.

"We just love sharing music with people and our family tradition is to basically sing music," said Andrew Blimke. "We sit in the living room and just share that, and since we were not able to do that last year we thought we will share it with basically the community."

Blimke says the concerts are being scaled back this year because of the cold weather, but he says they still expect to sing at about 50 houses in eight Mill Woods neighbourhoods.

"Even if we didn't make it out to people's places themselves, they saw that there was somebody driving around, visiting people and they felt more connected."

Residents say they were eager to greet the carollers, and feel very lucky to have the brothers spreading some Christmas cheer.

"When I was a kid, that was about 100 years ago, it was a common thing," said Marty Lalonde. "Now it's incredibly rare, especially with COVID on. But to have them come by like this, it's something to lift everybody's spirits."

With files from CTV News Edmonton's Jessica Robb