Holiday shoppers and other passersby in downtown Boston were pleasantly surprised Thursday to come upon a group of religious sisters singing Christmas carols in front of the Macy’s department store.

“It was warm everywhere else except where we were because of the wind, but people stayed anyway,” Pauline Sister Tracey Matthia Dugas told CNA Friday, noting that “some stayed through the whole selection of songs.”

Sister Tracey, director of mission advancement for the order in the United States, said that the sisters did nine songs for the public. She estimates that more than 150 bystanders listened to the Christmas songs throughout the free performance.

A portion of their performance can be seen below.

The Daughters of St. Paul are a religious order that focuses on evangelization through social communications and media. They often release professionally produced Christmas and religious song albums as a means of spreading the faith.

The group has been performing Christmas concerts for more than 25 years.

“The main reason we do it is to focus our hearts on the real meaning of Christmas,” Sister Tracey said.

What is the real meaning of Christmas? “God actually loved us so much that he emptied himself and entered our reality to show us that in our smallness and in our littleness, that’s the places that God can fill the most if, in our freedom, we open them to him,” she said.

Even in the face of the evils of the world, “God’s love prevails and is the strongest force of the universe,” she added.

Sister Tracey said that some of the bystanders may have never seen a nun before.

“I noticed a few young women, probably teens, stopped and stayed for at least three or four songs, and I could tell by the way they were interacting that we may be the first nuns they ever really saw,” Sister Tracey said.

The Daughters of St. Paul performed songs from their new album, Come to Bethlehem. They performed at a venue in Boston Friday night and are performing in Charleston, South Carolina, at the Charleston Gaillard Center on Dec. 11.

Tickets can be purchased here. Their new album can be found here.

“So it is the idea that God comes to us, but then we have to show up,” Sister Tracey said of the new album.

“God could have stayed in heaven and been separate from us, but he chose to be one of us.”