The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
I was a huge fan of Friends for just about all of its run (it lost some steam in its last season), and to this day, one of its Christmas episodes is among my favorite episodes of any teevee show, ever. So here’s “The Holiday Armadillo”:
Years and years ago, there were these people called…the Maccabees!!!
In the first season of The West Wing, the Christmas episode had a storyline in which Toby Ziegler (the communications director, and my favorite character on the show) was contacted when a homeless man died wearing one of his overcoats. It turned out to be a coat Toby had donated to Goodwill without removing his card from the pocket…and it turned out that the homeless man was a Korean War vet. Toby used his influence to arrange a full military funeral for the man, which resulted in one of the first season’s most memorable endings.
Hector Berlioz is often stereotyped as a composer who wrote for enormous orchestras in enormous halls, but he had his quiet and meditative side, as is seen best in his gentle oratorio L’Enfance du Christ (“The Childhood of Christ”). Since the events depicted in the oratorio come after the birth of Jesus, maybe this isn’t properly a Christmas selection, but that’s how I tend to view it. Here is the most famous part of the work, the chorus “The Shepherds’ Farewell”.