Gathering her extended family close on a big blue tarp, Sharon Gibbons from Jannali calls the Carols in the Domain her Christmas gift to her 10 grandchildren.
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She arrived here at 10am on Friday and stayed overnight, sleeping on a Thomas the Tank Engine mattress, for the Saturday event. Her front-row squat behind the VIP section is her Christmas gift to her ten grandchildren.
"Christmas doesn't start until I get here each year," she says. "It's a gift from the heart. It's an opportunity for people who don't have much in life to still enjoy Christmas. It draws us as a family all together."
She wants to hear Away in a Manger and Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand), and sings some of the words in a soft voice. The long list of carols, performed before an expected crowd of 80,000 people, will also feature The First Noel and O Come All Ye Faithful.
Snatches of conversations overheard at Carols in the Domain include: "She told her neighbours she was going to start afresh"; "Everybody hates trifle"; "You're not little forever".
There is time for talk between Christmas songs and big-screen commercials by the stage. Time to watch babies take their first jittery steps atop picnic blankets. Time to queue for waffles-on-a-stick.
You Raise Me Up is sung in tribute to Katrina Dawson, 38, and Tori Johnson, 34, who were killed in Martin Place on Tuesday. Big screens by the stage show images of the field of flowers that now covers the ground there in mourning.
In the hours before the carols start, businesses in the Domain do a brisk trade in flickering Santas, starfish and Disney mouse ears. Young girls suck down slushies as big as their head. A stall marked "Lost children and information" is empty.
Lauretta Baker, of Edensor Park, here for the first time with her three children, two nephews and a niece, is beset by sparkly soft drink company representatives and a woman with a petition to stop organ trafficking.
Then the stage lights up. Candles are waved in the night air. The Wiggles sing Silent Night and Ms Baker smiles. "I've had a few medical scares so I thought it was time we all got together to share the festive season," she says.
It's been a long year. But she's smiling still. "I'm not in the clear but I'm on the mend," she says.