A pretty significant winter storm rolled through the northeast the other day, and Buffalo doesn’t tend to get hit too hard by these when they roll through; we’re generally on the outer fringes of whatever dumps snow and ice (or rain) on the northeast corridor. But we did get some ice out of the deal. Here’s the resulting ice as it coated the berries that were left behind on one of the trees in our backyard.
Also, I’m saving this for later as I’ve jut found it as I write this post: The Niagara Falls Poetry Project.
And here we are! Today is the day!
I wish you the Merriest of Christmases and peace and love in this wondrous season.
“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.
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.
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.
Here we go! Via Sunday Stealing (and in turn via Roger):
1. Describe your favorite cake.
Chocolate cake is always lovely. So is vanilla cake. Cake is generally lovely…but my favorite? Carrot cake, with tons of cream cheese frosting. My favorite carrot cakes have golden raisins in them. And if I’m not sharing the cake with The Wife? Walnuts! (She hates walnuts and pecans. I do not understand this.)
2. Think of the best party you’ve ever attended. Were you a host or a guest?
Huh. I don’t think I’ve been to a non-work related party since my college years. I remember some lovely parties back then…well, parts of lovely parties, I suppose…but as far as I can recall, we were never the host, though. Always guests.
3. When you choose a greeting card, do you pay more attention to the words or the pictures?
Pictures. The fewer words, the better. I’m going to write something myself. (Unless it’s a genuinely funny card.)
4. What’s your favorite holiday?
They all have their charms…but in my head Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years all pile together into a five-to-six week long festival. I love the entire time of year.
Also Halloween. Halloween is cool.
5. Who is your favorite character on your favorite TV show?
Hoo-boy…I’m not sure what my “favorite teevee show” even is! I mean, all-time, Star Trek (original series) is probably in that mix, in which case obviously my answer is Captain James T. Kirk. But if I limit myself just to shows we’re watching right now (several of which have already ended), I’ll go with Asta from Resident Alien. If you haven’t watched that show (which is now complete and ended after four seasons), an alien crashes to Earth near a small town in Colorado, where he kills and assumes the identity of a reclusive doctor named Harry Vanderspiegel. Hilarity ensues. (And lest you feel sorry for the reclusive doctor, the show quickly establishes that he wasn’t a good guy at all!) Anyway, our alien hero becomes the town’s doctor, even though he’s really an alien (disguised as human, obviously), and he forms a friendship with the nurse at the small practice, a Native American woman named Asta Twelvetrees. Their relationship informs the show, and actress Sara Tomko plays Asta wonderfully as a woman with real emotional issues to deal with and a complex inner life, into which suddenly arrives this very strange man who is really an alien. The show is a terrific balance of real emotion and comic absurdity arising from very weird situations, and I love when good actors convincingly play a person who is trying to navigate a really strange situation. Tomko’s Asta is the straight woman to Alan Tudyk’s Harry, and they’re a delight.
And in a bonus, the second season expands Asta’s wardrobe to include overalls!
So, there we are. Yay, quizzes!
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!
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.
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.
