Never let it be said I don’t take requests! In comments to yesterday’s post, a reader asks about the possibility of the hammered dulcimer making an appearance in this series. I confess to not being familiar at all with this instrument; I know it exists, but that’s about it. I didn’t even know how it was played, beyond it involving, well, hammers. Turns out the hammers are a special kind of mallet that one deploys over the dulcimer’s strings to produce tones.
And it’s a very pleasing sound, I must admit. So, here are selections!
OK, today I provide a public service, if you so desire.
You may be familiar with a game called Whamageddon, in which you try to get as deep into December as you can without hearing “Last Christmas” by Wham!. Why this game, why this song? No idea, really…only the song is pretty ubiquitous as Christmas songs go, and many people find it outright annoying. (For me, the song is an “in one ear and out the other” song, I don’t have an opinion of it, one way or the other.)
As soon as you recognize that you’re hearing the original version of the song (it also has been covered a lot), you’re out.
Now, I personally have amended these rules with one caveat: if you hear it in a setting where you have no control over the music, it doesn’t count. Now, that doesn’t mean basically everywhere! You don’t control what you hear when you’re walking through Target, but you did choose to go to Target at that time! So that counts. But if you hear it at work, that doesn’t count. I’d also extend that to hearing it at doctor’s appointments, the hospital, or any other place where you really have to be for one reason or another. But if you could choose to be in that place, and you could have been there another time, and that’s when you hear “Last Christmas”, well. Bad luck, champ!
So anyway, if you’d just like to self-terminate your participation in this weird game and get it over with so you’re not finding your December increasingly dominated by the weird anxiety of possibly hearing “Last Christmas” through little fault of your own, well, I’m here to help. Just play the video below, breathe a sigh of relief, and go about your December like a non-weird person.
It’s December, so here we go. This year things feel markedly different. I suppose there’s only one way to avoid having to celebrate a first Christmas without your mother, and…well, I’m not signing up for that.
But still.
I’ve always featured this particular carol, all by itself, in a single post at some point. This year, it’s leading off, because it was her favorite Christmas carol. I hope you’re somewhere that you can hear these, Mom.
And at last we come to it: the day of The Birth, if you’re a believer. But you don’t have to be to get at least something out of the story and the emotions surrounding it.
I hope that whatever your beliefs may be, the day and the feelings surrounding it are good, happy, and true; and I hope that whatever is going on where you are, you and your loved ones are warm and safe.
Well, as I write this, it’s actually the 22nd and all of The 716 is going nuts in advance of both Christmas and what is at this point promising to be a winter storm for the ages. As you’re reading this, I hope I have power–and that you do, too! I’m obviously scheduling this in advance, for the very obvious reasons. This storm is sounding like something I’ve never seen before, so…well, I’m sure I’ll end up writing about it sooner or later. Hopefully sooner…and also hopefully soon we’re able to look back on it as a thing that happened as we move on.
Anyway, I post this album most years, one version or another. The original album came out in the 1960s, but then Robert Shaw recorded a revised version of the same material in the 1990s. Both are classics…and you know what? Here are both versions!
This work has been a popular Christmas piece almost ever since Berlioz wrote it–it was one of the few outright successes he got to enjoy during his life–even though it’s not about the birth of Christ but about what happened after, when Joseph and Mary and the child were fleeing Herod. Still, the work’s gentle nature–seemingly at odds with Berlioz’s unfair reputation for bombast–appeals greatly this time of year.
I think it’s always important to realize that Christmas is not a time of unremitting happiness and cheer. For many people Christmas is a deeply difficult time, and for those of us who are lucky enough to still be able to enjoy happy times at Christmas, there is still a sense of the bittersweet, as the memories of Christmases past accumulate and the sorrows that some are no longer with us remain.
Here are some bittersweet Christmas songs, some of which are favorites of mine, as essential to the season as “Jingle Bells” or “The Christmas Song”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSh4StH4zA8
And now, these two. I’ve written a lot about them in the past, so I’ll spare you all those thoughts this year too…but these two songs are absolutely a part of the Christmas moodscape for me.
This post is really simple: selections of music and/or songs from movies that may be Christmas movies directly, or may be Christmas movies even though they don’t initially seem like Christmas movies but really are, or movies that really are not Christmas movies specifically but hey, yes they are, just because.
Did that make sense? No? Well, I’m not re-typing it. Here’s some music.
