An upcoming concert at Southeast Missouri State University's River Campus will include well-known Christmas carols, coloring and cookies.

The Percussion Ensemble Family Holiday Concert will celebrate the season with music chosen for children of all ages.

This is the fifth year the River Campus will host this concert, which had less than 300 in attendance the first year and almost 800 in attendance last year.

Director Dr. Shane Mizicko said that with the attention span of children and even college students in mind, he has planned for the concert to be only 50 minutes long.

A rhythmic arrangement of "Jingle Bells," music from the movie "Polar Express" and excerpts from the Nutcracker are only a few of the pieces that make up the holiday show.

"This is a family concert as the title suggests, so the audience, it's geared toward families with young children, so we play everything from 'Christmas Time is Here,' a medley of 'Frosty the Snowman' and 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,'" Mizicko said. "With those pieces we also have a video slideshow that goes with it. We have a huge projection screen that we are playing live music to the video essentially or a slideshow, technically, so the kids have something to check out."

The "Polar Express" piece will be accompanied by a video slideshow.

According to Mizicko, five to eight dancers from the Dance Extensions dance studio in Jackson, Mo., will perform with the percussion ensemble during a few of the pieces, including the Nutcracker piece.

Members of the Southeast Missouri Wind Symphony, the university's top concert band, also will join the percussion ensemble for the Nutcracker and three other songs at the end of the concert.

"It's large percussion and then another about 15 wind players," Mizicko said. "All in all, there's going to be about 35 people playing on the last four pieces or so."

The percussion ensemble gave a preview performance of the concert from noon to 1 p.m. Nov. 28 in the University Center atrium.

Percussionist Kyle Pointer, who played in the preview concert, said that it is fun to get to play the holiday music, which is easier than what the ensemble performs in other concerts.

Mizicko said the group has been preparing for this concert since their last performance the last week of October, and this concert is fun for the students despite the hard work that they have to put into rehearsals.

"It's still fun, you don't have to be 6 to think Christmas music is fun," Pointer said. "It's not super serious. There's cookies."

There will be holiday coloring pages in the lobby of the Cultural Arts Center for children before the concert, and free milk and cookies afterward.

"We also have, for the children, they can purchase little egg shakers and they can play along with us," Mizicko said. "All the pieces on the concert are upbeat tunes, fast-paced, and so we sell little egg-shakers in the lobby beforehand and after so the children can actually shake along with us. So it's really geared toward kids of all ages. We have kids in strollers, very babyish, to plenty of college kids that check it out as well."

Mizicko said he tries to mix it up between traditional holiday music and modern rock 'n' roll Christmas songs, and that the performance is more crowd-pleasing than more serious concerts.

"It's really fun music. We're doing a couple rock 'n' roll type of things, we're doing a piece from Mannheim Steamroller this year, an arrangement of a Trans-Siberian Orchestra piece as well. Those are kind of the concluding pieces," Mizicko said. "We have pieces for, like I said, kids of all different ages from very young, where we have the 'Polar Express' and 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,' and then we're doing a piece by John Lennon, the 'Happy Xmas,' then Mannheim Steamroller and Trans-Siberian Orchestra for the older kids."

The concert will be at 10:30 a.m. Saturday in the Donald C. Bedell Performance Hall.

The concert has a suggested donation of $1 for people ages 6 and up.