This isn’t a very good song, but I’m using it because it is heard as source music in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Here’s “Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?”, by Nina (song written by John Barry).
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
Blackmore’s Night is one of my favorite bands, with their oddly endearing blend of Renaissance faire, folk, Celtic, and rock music. They came out with a Christmas album a few years back, and this is the first track.
Share This Post
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
So yesterday, I received an e-mail from my mother, in which she simply told me what her favorite Christmas song is. I puzzled for some moments as to why she felt the need to tell me this.
Yes, folks, sometimes I can be just that dense.
Here is “Un flambeau, Jeanette, Isabella”, sing by Diane Taraz.
Somehow, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard this song before…or at least, if I did, I may not have noticed it. Now I have, though. Thanks, Mom!
Share This Post
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
I think that my college choir performed this one year at our annual Big Christmas Music Hoopla, otherwise known as Christmas With Wartburg. Those programs were quite the undertaking, and they consumed four nights of our lives at the time: a performance on campus on Thursday night; a performance twenty miles down the road at a really big Lutheran church in Cedar Falls, IA, on Friday night; a performance at the Civic Center in downtown Des Moines on Saturday night; and a performance back at campus on Sunday afternoon. (The poor Choir, at the time, then had to do a performance of its own right after that fourth performance, during some kind of coffee hour, if I remember right.)
It was a lot of work and, coming as it did at the end of the fall semester, it put a lot of pressure on us students who also had to worry about finals and such. But those were some deeply special concerts, and I was more than a little bit ‘at sea’ in my senior year, when I was no longer in the band and thus was not involved in any way with the program. Those were wonderful times. In my sophomore year, I decompressed after the Sunday performance by watching Casablanca (this was the period when I discovered the film and watched it six Sundays in a row). The next year, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country opened on Friday, so right after the Cedar Falls performance, The Girlfriend (now The Wife) and I quickly changed and bopped over to the theater to see it. Good times. I miss those programs.
This is “Salvation is Created”, by Pavel Tchesnokov. It’s a live performance, so there’s audience noise, and ignore the graphic…the music is the thing here.
Share This Post
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
I don’t care if the eyes are creepily unreal; I like the movie The Polar Express. Part of it is the music, by stalwart composer Alan Silvestri. Silvestri is not a great composer, by any means, but he is a very solid and professional one, with a fine gift for melody and clear orchestral writing. He was really the ideal composer for a project like The Polar Express. (He also tends to be the composer-of-choice for director Robert Zemeckis.) Here is Silvestri’s Suite from the film.
Share This Post
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
Ayup…I missed a day, but through the magic of backdating posts, I can act as though this was here all the time! Huzzah! I had to work very early yesterday morning, and then after I got home from work, there was a nap followed by a shower followed by a lovely evening out with The Family, so I never really got a chance to do any blogging whatsoever. Hence this entry…a day late.
Anyway, it’s something of a law that we’re all supposed to watch A Christmas Story a bunch of times each year. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of this movie, to be honest. It’s enjoyable enough, but I don’t find it essential — in fact, I didn’t even see the whole thing, start to finish, until just a few years ago. It basically puts me in mind of an overlong episode of The Wonder Years, without the earnest life lessons and Kevin’s eternal yearning for Winnie Cooper. Still, the scene with the kids going to see Santa at the department store is comedy gold, so here it is.
I’m not one to wax poetic a lot about the stuff from yesteryear that’s been lost to the Onward March of Time, but I do kind of miss downtown department stores at Christmas, from the era when each city had its own store instead of every city having a Macy’s downtown. (Except Buffalo, of course. Our downtown department store died years ago and ain’t coming back, ever. Fuhgeddaboudit.)
Share This Post
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
I used to watch re-runs of Little House on the Prairie quite often, and I still have a soft spot for the earlier seasons of the show, before it started going way over the top in later years. It was just such an earnest show. I vaguely recall this clip, which is pretty simple: a bunch of Walnut Grovians are snowed in at the schoolhouse. I don’t recall what strife prompts Charles to soothe the savage breasts of Walnut Grove by reading from Luke chapter two, but…well, Michael Landon was the William Shatner of family dramas.