A month-long series of free concerts in Dorchester and the South End kicked off last weekend and will continue through the month of December through the Celebrity Series of Boston. On Sunday, Dec. 8, composer Shaw Pong Liu will bring her group Code Listen 3.0 to the Salvation Army Kroc Center on Dudley Street for a 3 p.m. performance.

The group unites mothers and teens who have lost loved ones to homicides, community social services, and Boston Police, all of whom will perform original music by Liu. During the event, posters honoring performers’ loved ones who have been murdered will be displayed in the space.

On Dec. 15, the Kroc Center will host ‘Heart of the Holidays: Tales of Light’ featuring the Guy Mendilow Ensemble, Regie Gibson, Boston City Singers Tour Choir, and Courtney Swain. With spoken word and music inspired by the musicians’ different cultural backgrounds, the performance promises a different kind of holiday show.

Mendilow, a Roxbury resident, says that the performance will be “a fairy tale that is framed by a conversation between winter, or what we call the cold dark, and the group of people who have the memory of the spell that the cold dark cast, which is an illusion of omnipresence.”

“These holidays are also about tales where there’s this miracle of light, and what does that mean?” Mendilow said. “What would it mean to enact a miracle of light in our own time just when it gets darkest outside and from that least likely of places? Not Harvard, Dorchester. Not the White House, Mattapan. What does it mean to find such a stunning beautiful light that comes from the cracks in the pavement?”

On Dec. 20 at 5 p.m., the final performance in the series—50 Portraits of Villa Victoria— will blend hip-hop and jazz saxophone featuring artist Devin Ferreira in a 5 p.m. show at Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción, 405 Shawmut Ave. in the South End. For more details — and to RSVP— go to celebrityseries.org.