At this time of year, I often think of my childhood music teacher, Eunice Fitton.

I was 9 when my family moved to Maine in 1972. The small Catholic parochial school I previously attended in Massachusetts offered no “specialty teachers.” We ran around at recess in lieu of gym. We did craft projects at our desks for art. And we sang hymns at the masses we attended throughout the year.

So when I enrolled in the fifth grade at the Park Street School in Kennebunk, I was surprised by the weekly music instruction with Miss Fitton.

At home, my father had taught me how to harmonize and carry a tune. And so, with few male students to choose from, Miss Fitton quickly recruited me for the elementary school chorus, which met on Tuesday and Thursday mornings half an hour before school began.

It was under her tutelage that I learned to read music and to understand terms like adagio, acapella and allegro.

And for the next eight years, through junior high and high school, where she was also the choral director, each September my fellow singers and I would be presented with the ancient carols and popular seasonal tunes to be performed in mid-December at the “holiday concert.”

During that span, it seemed we were introduced to every musical arrangement of the seasonal “fa-la-la-las” and “pa-rum-pa-pum-pums” that have ever been written. But what most stands out in my memory were the challenging classical pieces that Miss Fitton selected for us to sing.

To this day, when I hear Handel’s rousing “Hallelujah Chorus,” Pachelbel’s “Canon” or Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” I recall the majesty of having once performed those works myself. Sure, it was in the KHS gym, not in Symphony Hall, but we sang the same notes, made fresh by Miss Fitton’s interpretation and under the guidance of her baton.

Eunice Fitton died this past September. She was 100 years old. I learned from her obituary that as a sophomore in high school growing up in Bridgton, that she played second violin for the Portland Symphony Orchestra. And she graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston with a bachelor’s degree in June of 1946, which meant she first began studying there at the height of WWII.

Her stature grew in my mind with these discoveries.

While I knew she had dedicated her career to creating music in our small town where she taught for some 27 years, I realized that what she brought to that task were grand expectations for her charges that others might have seen unachievable by a ragtag high school and junior high chorus.

While, of course, there were frustrating days and flawed rehearsals, she was not easily discouraged when introducing challenging music to a tiny band of tinny voices.

For I sense that no matter how we sang those ancient chorales (and I suppose it is better for me that there are no recordings of those concerts), she heard the music we produced as it was meant to be performed. Her gift to us was an untiring belief in our talents and the expectation that we, too, could be heirs to this centuries-old musical legacy.

In his book “Among Schoolchildren,” Tracy Kidder spent a year following one dedicated teacher in her classroom in an elementary school in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He then observed: “Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.”

When the carols play, I think of the good that Miss Fitton produced. And I imagine her now singing with the choir of heavenly angels and, on occasion, leading them with her confident baton.