Music plays a very important part in family life. We celebrate the milestones of our lives with music. It colors the everyday moments that shape our lives. Weddings, births, birthdays, and holidays are all marked with special songs, the songs that create indelible memories shared by everyone in the family. While I was growing up, all of my family gatherings included Armenian sing alongs: Nor Daree (New Year’s) at My Uncle Hovsep’s and Aunt Zvart’s home in Montreal, parties at many friends’ homes, and in my Godfather Sarkis Berberian’s home. Armenians especially celebrate through music. Our music is unique. It reflects our love, our difficult history and our place on the world map. As a very young child, I was surrounded by Armenian music. Both of my parents sang to me and sang in our church, where my father was and still is a deacon. By the time I was two years old, I’d been singing these melodies and nursery rhymes on a daily basis.

I did not realize how important these childhood songs and rhymes would become until I was pregnant with my daughter Jacqueline Lucine. The love for the music of my past grew intensely as my child grew inside me. I found myself searching for new music that expressed how I felt as motherhood was approaching. I would spend hours in her nursery before she was born singing in Armenian to her and visualizing how my parents had sang to me and how countless generations before me had this same love affair with these beautiful melodies.

In this quest I found some wonderful CDs from which to choose, but very little in actual written music or in recorded poetry and rhymes. When I did find music and poems, it was written only in Armenian, excluding any person who did not have the key to unlock our alphabet from learning these beautiful songs. There was not a single source that I could locate that included Armenian, English translations and transliterations for anyone who was interested in passing on our very special children’s song and nursery rhyme library to the next generation.

It became clear to me that I had a new purpose: to encapsulate the poems, songs, nursery rhymes and prayers that my grandparents passed to my parents, and in turn passed on to me. I wanted this to be a source not only for Jacqueline, but also for any person who yearned to learn these songs and these reflections of childhood, especially to those who could not read or write in Armenian. These songs reflect the simplicity of childhood, and celebrate our rich heritage.

Mangootyan Hoosherus is a collection of some of my favorite songs, children’s poetry and rhymes that I hope you will share with your children to teach them these timeless melodies that show our love of music, our beautiful language, and the love of our homeland, our Hayreneek.