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“It’s not a tradition here in Canada as much as it is in the U.S., but some people will know what it means when I do this,” Maharaj said before picking up a hand bell and ringing it several times.

Under an unforgiving sun during a heat wave in July, Peter Schumann, the 89-year-old artistic director of Bread and Puppet Theater, rang a hand bell on a rolling hillside in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.

Hand bell ringing is harder than it looks and Warchus had to teach the cast to overcome what he calls, “bell ringer’s face” — an expression of rigidity and terror — which works against the mood he means the carol to create: peace, humility, generosity of spirit.

Police said the early-Medieval hand bell was stolen from uninhabited St Finan's Isle in Loch Shiel sometime over the past month.

“Oyez, oyez, oyez!” town crier Tony Appleton exclaimed, accompanied by three rings of his hand bell.