Category: CHRISTMAS, Y’ALL!!!

And here we are! Today is the day!

I wish you the Merriest of Christmases and peace and love in this wondrous season.

Share This Post

“Why are you sitting there resting, when we’re so near the end?”
–Professor Henry Jones, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

And here we are, the last day before Christmas. I’m always sorry to see this season go. We always seem a bit too eager to put it behind us and get back to regular stuff like work and just…normal life stuff. Isn’t life better when we expend effort to make our worlds beautiful and take time to revel in what isn’t normal?

Anyway, at this point, we reach “grab bag of items I like but didn’t get around to sharing in a dedicated post” time, so, here we go!

These next two are in remembrance of Robert John Guttke.

Share This Post

Every year I used to feature Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite…until a few years ago when I started featuring the entire Nutcracker. And here it is. Enjoy.

The performance is by the ballet, orchestra, and chorus of the National Opera of Ukraine.

Here, by the way, is what it’s like to be one of the actual dancers:

Also, because I cannot think of The Nutcracker without thinking of my old college orchestra conductor…thank you, Dr. Janice Wade.

Share This Post

I always think it’s important to acknowledge that for all the twinkly-lights-and-gaiety that inform our typical notion of Christmas, those things can also set Christmas up for a bit of failure. For a holiday-festival like Christmas, which centers family and memory and other similar things, all the various memories that we associate with Christmas can’t be all-cheery, all-the-time. It can be remembering the last year Grammy visited at Christmas…and then, as the years go on, other memories add up. It can be the significant other who spent that wonderful Christmas with us…before the relationship ended the next year. It can be seeing your adult children having their own Christmases with friends and new family, while you remember the effort to make their Christmases magical when they were young. And it’s remembering those who aren’t alive anymore at all.

All the twinkly-lights-and-gaiety is wonderful and I love it, but I also believe very strongly in admitting that parts of this annual festival of ours are very hard. So, here are some Christmas songs that range from the bittersweet to the outright sad. This first is an annual feature here, because I often find myself thinking this time of year of the roads I didn’t take even as I think about the roads that may lie before me.

This one’s new to me this year:

Also new to me this year is this one. I discovered Sara Bareilles this year (we watched, and loved, Girls5Eva), and this maybe isn’t precisely a Christmas song at all. But I think it fits into the vibe for this post.

Share This Post

I feature this work most years, and there’s a reason for that: it’s good! And if you’ve never heard it before, here’s a treat: a good and proper short British symphony, loaded with familiar Christmas tunes and old-fashioned proper Britishness, or British properness. Something like that. It’s the “Carol Symphony” by Victory Hely-Hutchinson.

There, that’s fun, isn’t it! However….

It turns out that Hely-Hutchinson’s is not the only Carol Symphony out there! Composer Patric Standford (1939-2014) also wrote one, and listening to both back-to-back is a nice exercise in contrast. Neither of these works is a towering contribution to symphonic literature, but they are both lovely longer-form contributions to Christmas music, and that’s terrific!

Share This Post

Complete the sentence: I love ____ and yet I don’t partake enough of it!

For me, it’s vocal music. I tend to strongly default to orchestral music for my usual listening, and there’s not anything exactly wrong with that…after all, there is enough orchestral music in all varieties that one could listen to nothing but orchestral music for an entire lifetime and still barely scratch the surface. Every year at Christmastime, though, I end up listening briefly to more chamber music, more non-orchestral instrumental music, and more vocal music. Why doesn’t this carry over to the rest of the year? Who knows. Maybe in 2026. We’ll see.

Anyway, one of the great things about the YouTube age is the availability of many, many wonderful performances of just about anything one could want to hear…including entire concert programs by highly skilled ensembles, such as this one. As I write this, it’s 8:45 am on Saturday, 20 December 2025, I’m halfway through my second cup of coffee and getting ready to move on with my day. The sun is rising in the backyard…literally! That photo above? I took it just now. I grabbed my phone, turned around, took the photo, edited it, uploaded it, and shared it here. That’s commitment to content, folks!

Getting back to the point, as I’ve been sitting here, checking social media and editing photos and sipping my coffee, I’ve been listening to this wonderful program of vocal Christmas music. Here the King’s College London Chapel Choir performs English Christmas carols and songs from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Some you will recognize, others will be new. 

Share This Post

Speaking of “Lucky finds by the YouTube algorithm”, we have this wonderful rendition of one of my absolute favorite Christmas songs of all time. AND, it has the correct lyrics! (I won’t repeat the rant this year, but if you’re curious, here you go.)

Of course, as wonderful as that performance is, I’m never going to not feature the original and never-equaled version of this song. Here is Judy Garland, from Meet Me In St. Louis.

Share This Post

Fifty-six years ago today, the greatest James Bond movie ever made, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, premiered. I have written about OHMSS extensively here and also here (as part of my Definitive Ranking Of All The Bond Films), so I won’t go into it in detail in this post…but it’s the one Bond film that takes place specifically at Christmastime, and it actually has its very own Christmas song, written for the film by composer John Barry and lyricist Hal David. The song, “Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown”, in heard briefly in the film when Bond is in a Swiss village trying to evade Blofeld’s minions. Is it a great song? Should it be a Christmas standard? Maybe not…but for me it is.

Share This Post

Longtime followers of this site may recall that as Christmas draws nearer–and as of this posting, we’re less than ten days out–this feature shifts focus to be more and more reflective of my sentiment regarding Christmas. This is when old favorites that I love dearly start to appear in this space; this is when we reach the point of “It’s not Christmas until I hear [insert music thing here].”

I didn’t know, until fairly late in her life, that this was my mother’s favorite Christmas tune. Once she told me, I made sure to feature it every year…and now I do so in tribute. I don’t know what I believe, if anything, in terms of an afterlife, but I hope that if there is one, it’s a place where we can hear all the music we loved in life, all the time. Here you go, Mom.

Share This Post

A harpsichord will have around 61 keys. Some more, some less.

A piano famously has 88 keys…but not always. The Bosendorfer company makes pianos with up to 97 keys.

A pipe organ can have as many as 200 keys…and adds in a full set of pitched foot pedals, and a set of controls called “stops” that control specifically where the air that makes all that sound goes.

The amount of coordination needed to perform pretty much anything on a pipe organ amazes me.

In all my classical music listening, I generally have never much devoted a lot of time to the various keyboard instruments. I love the piano, and yet music for piano represents very little of my casual listening. I generally am not much of a harpsichord fan, so unless I’m listening to a larger work that includes it in the ensemble, I almost never hear it. And then there’s the grandest of the keyboard instruments, the pipe organ.

These gigantic, grandiose instruments really are amazing things. No single musical edifice is better suited to filling a space with sound than the pipe organ; in terms of spaciousness, the pipe organ can really only be matched by the modern orchestra. Pipe organs are, of course, immobile; once built, that’s where they stay. The best chances to hear a pipe organ are obviously in church settings, though many concert halls do have one; not all, though, and many orchestras have to travel to a nearby large church if they want to perform a piece that calls for organ.

This first video is really new! It was uploaded just a few days ago and popped onto my feed Sunday morning (I continue to believe that of all the social media algorithms, YouTube’s is the best at providing stuff that I might find interesting). The music itself is a French carol called “Quand Jésus naquit à Noël”. This is a carol dating from the 1700s, as far as I can gather, and it is absolutely lively and downright joyous. Also note the instrument here: this is not the modern pipe organ with powered transfers and stops helpfully labeled with the names of instrument groupings. This instrument is the real deal: the stops are the ones you push in or pull out, depending on the need (hence the phrase, “pulling out all the stops”), and you can see the bellows working behind her. This is simply wonderful stuff.

Here, for contrast, is the modern organ in action, in a piece called “A Christmas Fantasy”. It’s very nice…but I have to admit, my preference lies with the earlier work on the vintage instrument.

By the way, my preference stated above is in no way meant to disparage the modern organ! Each organ is different, after all; each is made for its space, and you can often look up some information about them. Case in point!

You know what? Let’s revisit the artist from the first video above. What a great random suggestion by the YouTube algorithm! Sometimes that thing just nails it.

Share This Post