The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
And at last we come to it: the day of The Birth, if you’re a believer. But you don’t have to be to get at least something out of the story and the emotions surrounding it.
I hope that whatever your beliefs may be, the day and the feelings surrounding it are good, happy, and true; and I hope that whatever is going on where you are, you and your loved ones are warm and safe.
Well, as I write this, it’s actually the 22nd and all of The 716 is going nuts in advance of both Christmas and what is at this point promising to be a winter storm for the ages. As you’re reading this, I hope I have power–and that you do, too! I’m obviously scheduling this in advance, for the very obvious reasons. This storm is sounding like something I’ve never seen before, so…well, I’m sure I’ll end up writing about it sooner or later. Hopefully sooner…and also hopefully soon we’re able to look back on it as a thing that happened as we move on.
Anyway, I post this album most years, one version or another. The original album came out in the 1960s, but then Robert Shaw recorded a revised version of the same material in the 1990s. Both are classics…and you know what? Here are both versions!
Hector Berlioz, L’Enfance du Christ.
This work has been a popular Christmas piece almost ever since Berlioz wrote it–it was one of the few outright successes he got to enjoy during his life–even though it’s not about the birth of Christ but about what happened after, when Joseph and Mary and the child were fleeing Herod. Still, the work’s gentle nature–seemingly at odds with Berlioz’s unfair reputation for bombast–appeals greatly this time of year.
I think it’s always important to realize that Christmas is not a time of unremitting happiness and cheer. For many people Christmas is a deeply difficult time, and for those of us who are lucky enough to still be able to enjoy happy times at Christmas, there is still a sense of the bittersweet, as the memories of Christmases past accumulate and the sorrows that some are no longer with us remain.
Here are some bittersweet Christmas songs, some of which are favorites of mine, as essential to the season as “Jingle Bells” or “The Christmas Song”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSh4StH4zA8
And now, these two. I’ve written a lot about them in the past, so I’ll spare you all those thoughts this year too…but these two songs are absolutely a part of the Christmas moodscape for me.
This post is really simple: selections of music and/or songs from movies that may be Christmas movies directly, or may be Christmas movies even though they don’t initially seem like Christmas movies but really are, or movies that really are not Christmas movies specifically but hey, yes they are, just because.
Did that make sense? No? Well, I’m not re-typing it. Here’s some music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzMaS79TDI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V3kc56a20A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G6dd7ikrXs
One week to the big day! Wow! It’s coming, folks!
This may be the last “new thing to me” that I post for this year; usually as Christmas gets very near, I start posting all of my old favorites, including some long-form stuff and entire albums. A friend posted this today on Facebook, wondering why it never got any actual traction; I honestly can’t say, since I’d never heard it before today (unless the album it’s from happened to be in my parents’ collection when I was a kid; I remember at least a few albums by this artist in those record stacks). It’s a piece by Henry Mancini, called “Carol for Another Christmas”.
I just looked the piece up, and it turns out it comes from a teevee movie from 1964 called A Carol for Another Christmas. It was a modernized version of A Christmas Carol, and apparently it wasn’t very well received, so it basically disappeared entirely, never airing again until a cable revival in 2012. Oddly, by this time the rights to Mancini’s music were in flux, so even then the film couldn’t be aired with its original music!
Anyway, this is a lovely theme, quite Christmasy. And if you want to hear the entire album, here’s a playlist you can cue up.