The Christmas season can have different effects on people. Some embrace the season, full of joy and giving. Others feel stressed and are pushed to spend too much money on Christmas gifts. Yet another group of people feels depressed, possibly due to family and loved ones no longer with them, or because they have no money to spoil their family and friends.

Chemotherapy is not a pleasant treatment to go through, but a nurse, named Alex Collazo, decided to make Christmas beautiful for her patient by singing a duet of “O Holy Night” with Penn Pennington and the result was truly beautiful.

Talented guitarist and singer duet in Sarah Cannon Cancer Center

As reported by The Tennessean, Penn Pennington, 67, has been playing the guitar and singing at many country bars in Nashville for quite a while. According to his family, he has been doing so for more than 30 years, including a 23-year-long gig with singer Jack Greene at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry.

However, these days Penn is spending a lot of his time at the Sarah Cannon Cancer Center receiving treatment for a Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosis. You can’t keep a good singer down, however, especially so close to Christmas.

Oncology nurse Alex, 24, had heard about Penn’s love for music and singing and decided to bring her own guitar with her to take the patient’s mind off the grueling chemotherapy treatments.

Pennington’s daughter was there when Alex brought her dad her guitar and caught the duet on video as he strummed the strings and the nurse and her patient sang “O Holy Night” in a perfect duet. Reportedly they sang a few more songs too.

Pennington’s daughter called the performance ‘amazing’

Brandi Mykle Leath, Penn’s daughter, told Fox 17 that Alex had discovered Penn was a guitarist and had decided to bring in her guitar for a jam session with her dad.

She said the performance was “amazing” and very uplifting as the duo sang their hearts out to the chords of the guitar. Her father told her the duet was an escape for him during the cancer treatment.

As for Collazo, it was in middle school that she took up the guitar, but singing is where her musical heart truly really is. She said that as she admitted Penn to the hospital they got talking.

She asked him to tell her something fun about himself, as she could see he was feeling a little down. Pennington told the amazed nurse he had gone skydiving around 1,250 times. Meanwhile, Alex shared her love for music with her patient. This was when they decided to get together for a festive jam session and duet, to incredible effect.

According to Brandi, the kind nurse had been treating her father like family from the first time she entered his hospital room. She posted the video to Facebook, where it has since gone viral, attracting 75,000 views by Tuesday afternoon.

Readers can watch, like and share the resulting video posted to YouTube by the Knoxville News Sentinel below. If this doesn’t get everyone into the real meaning of Christmas, nothing will.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED