Daily Dose of Christmas

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 PostDown the rabbit hole….

“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 inDown the rabbit hole….

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 PostDown the rabbit hole….

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 canDown the rabbit hole….

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 symphonicDown the rabbit hole….

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.Down the rabbit hole….

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 PostDown the rabbit hole….

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 aDown the rabbit hole….

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 doDown the rabbit hole….

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 toDown the rabbit hole….