I really love A Prairie Home Companion. Here is Garrison Keillor doing “The Twelve Days of Christmas”, with an assist by his always-able sound effects guy, Tom Keith, who died a couple years ago.
Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
I know I’ve used this for the Daily Dose before, but…well, this is one of the staples for me. Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne” is only tangentially about Christmas, I suppose — just the song’s setting, on Christmas Eve, in the very first verse, and then Christmas isn’t really mentioned at all after that. But still, the song almost perfectly captures something about Christmas that doesn’t tend to be talked about much.
Christmas is such a time of emotion, isn’t it? It’s almost certainly our most emotional holiday. I really think it is. Nearly every emotion the heart produces has a home in Christmas, and that includes the sad ones, too. I’ve not yet met the person who wasn’t at least a little bit reflective at Christmastime, some more than others to be sure, but…in amidst the joys of this season, it seems terribly natural to me to also think of choices not made, roads not taken, lives not lived. It’s not always bad, even, but there are moments of sparkling sadness when I wonder what else I might have done.
This shouldn’t imply dissatisfaction, although for some people, I suppose it does. But I can’t imagine that the happiest person, the person most satisfied with the warp and weft of their time on Earth, doesn’t at least once in a while glance back and wonder:
“Is she happy now?”
“What if he had lived?”
“Why didn’t I accept that offer?”
“Would they be proud of what I’ve done?”
These feelings always bubble up at Christmastime, and I’m not entirely sure why. Lots of reasons, I suppose — the holiday’s sacred undertones, whether you believe or not; the timing, putting this season at the end of the year, so you can’t help feeling the weight of more time behind you. I wonder if Christmas would feel a little less melancholy if it took place in January.
Anyhow, “Same Old Lang Syne” famously recounts the tale of when Dan Fogelberg had a chance encounter in a convenience store with an old girlfriend from years before. They spend the night catching up, talking about where their lives have gone, the good and the less good. There’s no affair here, no one-night stand — they meet by chance, they talk a while, they part — and Fogelberg sings of remembering “that old familiar pain”, which is such a perfect way to put it.
“Same Old Lang Syne” absolutely is a Christmas song, because it expresses something true about Christmas. It’s not all about jolly elves and babes in mangers. It can’t be, because we’re human and we humans bring an awful lot of messy stuff to the table.
Oh, and the song is really best listened to in the car. Even if it’s in a parking lot with the engine off.
And for those wondering, yes, the song was inspired by very real events.
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
My alma mater, Wartburg College, does a big yearly music production at Christmas, called Christmas With Wartburg. It’s always quite a production, with several vocal groups coming together with several instrumental groups to present a sacred program. Putting it together was a lot of work each year, and the performances consumed an entire weekend — at the time we would perform twice on campus and then once in Cedar Falls, IA (a bigger town twenty miles away) and once in Des Moines.
I mention all this because our main rival school, Luther College, does a similar thing. Here’s their rendition of “Angels We Have Heard On High”, one of my two favorite Christmas hymns (I can’t choose between this one and “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing”). As a still-loyal Wartburg grad, I’d love to be able to say that those nitwits from Luther screw it up, but…no, I wouldn’t love to be able to say that. There’s just as much talent there as at Wartburg, and this is really well done.
(But still…go Knights!)
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
I have my issues with Aaron Sorkin, but there are still times when he grabs me and doesn’t let go. Two brief scenes from the first season episode of The West Wing, entitled “In Excelsis Deo”. The backstory here (among political stuff) is that Toby Ziegler (communications director at the White House) gets a call from DC police because a homeless man has been found dead, wearing a coat that had Toby’s business card in the pocket. Toby realizes that the coat was one he donated to a shelter or something, and the card was still in the pocket; he learns that the homeless guy was a Korean War veteran, and uses the President’s clout to arrange a military funeral, with the guy’s surviving brother (also homeless) in attendance.
Along the way, we learn something of Mrs. Landingham, which is a good reminder that the Christmas season is not always a time of happy memories for everyone. There’s a reason so much joy and so much melancholy tend to coexist at Christmas.
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
I’ve said this before, but where I’m usually able to separate music from specific associations to things in my life, there are exceptions, and Tchaikovsky’s Suite from The Nutcracker is one of them. We played this every year in the Symphony Orchestra at college on the Christmas program, and in my junior year Fantasia came out on home video (VHS, huzzah!), so this suite invariably takes me back to Wartburg College, orchestra rehearsals under Maestro Janice Wade (who would get so mad if we tried to ritard in the very last bars of the Waltz of the Flowers!), and watching Fantasia.
So here is this year’s posting of the Suite from The Nutcracker. How I love this work! (And this is an unusually fine performance.)