A lot of musicians have recorded “Children, Go Where I Send Thee,” such as the Weavers, where I first probably heard it, or Odetta, just to name two.
But for joy and sheer verve, I haven’t heard a rendition to match this one.
Johnny Cash, members of the Carter family, Carl Perkins, the Statler Brothers and the Tennessee Three, in 1971 in Denmark and in their prime. Solid camera work, too. Somehow or other I never saw this wonderful clip until the other day.
Christmas cake isn’t much of a holiday custom in the U.S., though it is more so in Japan, in as much as Christmas gets attention there beyond a modest amount of decoration and KFC. Actually, I don’t remember any to-do about KFC on Christmas in the early ’90s in Japan. Maybe it’s really a Tokyo thing — that’s often enough mistaken for the entirely of Japan by gaijin observers. Or maybe I wasn’t paying attention.
I digress. Yuriko made a Christmas cake this year.
Much chocolate, a healthy serving of cherries, and, you’ll see, a few dashes of edible gold. It’s so good it’ll hardly last until Christmas.
I opened up one of our boxes of physical photo prints the other day, when I moved it from the space that the Christmas tree, bought on Saturday, now occupies. The photos are only partly organized, but even so I found some holiday images from the days before digital photography.
December 1997
The first time we took Lilly out, who appears here in one of those baby-hauling slings. We went to Lincoln Park on an unusually warm December day, including a visit to the conservatory, which had a display of poinsettias.
December 2000
One of the Christmases in the western suburbs.
December 2003
First Christmas in the northwestern suburbs, and first one for Ann.
December 2006
Ann and Lilly with a Santa Claus — maybe the one who used to appear at the office of the Realtor who sold us our house. That’s pretty much a Realtor sort of thing to do for the holidays. By this time, Ann was learning about the jolly old elf; and Lilly had given up on literal Santa, but was game enough to visit with her sister.
Various sources said there was a full moon out there on Thursday the 12th, but clouds obscured it. Still, for December, the day was a warmish (40s F.) and Friday will be likewise, they say. Time to acquire a Christmas tree.
The tree-selling business where we’ve bought maybe a half dozen trees over the last decade has vanished. During the warm months, the lot featured a nursery, next to a private dwelling where the proprietors lived. In December, it had a large stock of Christmas trees. Got one there just last year.
But not quite every year during the 2010s. One year we went to a church lot some miles north of home; can’t remember why. Another year, we found a tree at a parking lot of a downmarket retail property. And yet another time, when I waited too long, a tree came from the last-resort expedient of a big DIY store.
That reminded me of the time in my youth, sometime in the early ’70s, when we didn’t get a tree until Dec. 23. Pickings were slim.
Then there was the time in London when we had no intention of getting a tree to decorate the flat we’d rented in East Ealing. A few days before Christmas, however, we were returning to the flat from the train station, and spotted a small tree abandoned and naked on the sidewalk. Maybe three feet tall. So we took it back and somehow made it stand up and decorated our serendipitous tree with something or other. Pieces of paper, ribbons, I forget what.
Now the lot we’ve shopped at over the years is empty and all of the accouterments of the nursery — the large shed, mostly — are gone. There are no Christmas trees for sale but a sign says the house is for sale. That’s that.
Most of yesterday’s snow is gone. If winter were like that all the way through around here, that would suit me. Then again, that would also probably mean Texas-like summers and the melting of the Greenland ice sheet for starters, so never mind.
Christmas lights and decorations are sprouting rapidly in our neighborhood, some modest, some modestly gaudy. No one here goes for the full Griswold, or even a half or quarter Griswold.
As for Christmas in the stores, all that sprouted weeks ago. Still, sometimes I see new things. New to me, anyway. Like a Neon Santa.
Available at a warehouse store I visit sometimes. Could have been mine for about $30, but I passed on it. I also noticed that it isn’t actually neon. In our time, it’s an LED Santa.
December didn’t arrive with a blast of snow, but instead gray skies that gave up rain from time to time, which — by Sunday just after dark — had turned into light snow. In other words, weather like we’ve had much of the time since the Halloween snow fell, followed by the Veterans Day snow.
Come to think of it, we had Palm Sunday snow this year. Seems like a year for named-day snows. But no Thanksgiving snow. Or Absence of Color Friday snow (well, maybe).
Took no pictures of 2019 Thanksgiving dinner. Will there be a time when it’s socially mandatory to take a picture of every special-event or holiday meal? Or every meal? Sounds like a small component of dark tale you’d see in Black Mirror.
This year’s meal looked pretty much like this plate — same kind of fish bought from the same place — and was just as good, with the food prepared mostly by my daughters’ skilled hands. Chocolate creme pie for dessert, also from a store, and one we’ve enjoyed before. I did all cleanup, a multi-pan, multi-dish, many-utensil effort, but worth it.
A classic November day outside my window today. Slate gray sky, rain in the morning, chilly but not freezing, gusts of wind pushing leaves around. At least week’s ice and snow are gone. They’ll be back. A brown Christmas would suit me fine, but I can’t count on it.
Back to posting after Thanksgiving, around December 1, after a week-long holiday from posting, but not from work this year. Still, being off on Thursday and Friday — which will include no special consumer activity on my part — ought to be pretty sweet, as always.
We will probably hit the grocery store on Tuesday or Wednesday evening. Meat, carbohydrates, sweets, etc. Exact menu to be determined in conference with the rest of my family in the near future.
Here’s Phil Ochs’ adaption of Poe’s “The Bells.” Didn’t know about it until recently. Nice.
I have a big book of Poe’s work from the library that I’ve been grazing lately. Read “The Bells” again, among other things, after many years. I’d forgotten most of it. Somehow I didn’t notice when I was younger that the poem progresses from silver to gold to brass (brazen) to iron bells — from merriment to happiness to alarm to death, or at least what I take for death in poem, though not the song:
They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A pæan from the bells!
Last night I read “Hop-Frog,” which I hadn’t before. A neat little revenge story, like “The Cask of the Amontillado,” though not quite in the same horrifying league. I guessed the ending — what violence Hop-Frog was planning. No matter. Poe’s usually worth a read. The influence of even that minor story seems to turn up in odd places.
Halloween snow today. Mid-morning.
Mid-afternoon. Of course, it will melt in a day or two.
I’ve spent a fair number of Halloweens in the North; this is the first time snow has fallen. Cold rain, sometimes, but no snow. Sometimes warm fall days or blustery cool ones, like the Halloween of 2001, when Lilly was so unnerved by the dark and the strong winds while out trick-or-treating that she insisted that I carry her home. She wasn’t quite four, so it was possible — but tiring.
Speaking of Halloween, I’ve been listening to “Danse Macabre” lately.
In high school, I made the mistake of calling the piece “Halloween music” in front of my band director. He let me have it. It’s a tone poem! It’s serious music from France! It’s blah blah blah. Know what, Mr. W? I was right. It can be all those other things and Halloween music as well. Halloween as in spirits roaming our world before All Hallow’s, not the candy-gathering custom.
The last place we visited during the recent Virginia trip was the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in the Shockoe Bottom neighborhood of Richmond.
A small, specialized museum not in a house that Poe lived in — one of the places he lived was a few blocks away, long demolished — but including a building that is suitably old. In fact, according to a plaque on the wall, the oldest house still standing in Richmond, the Ege House.
All in all, an interesting little museum. Ann thought so too. I found out things I didn’t know, such as that Poe was a gifted athlete at the University of Virginia. Also heard more about things I did know, such as that after Poe died, his enemy Rufus Griswold wrote damning and largely false accounts of the author — vestiges of which still cling to Poe.
The museum is essentially three rooms: Poe’s early life, which was haunted by Death; Poe’s literary career, which was informed by Death; and Poe’s early and mysterious death, which was literally about Death. Some of the artifacts were owned by Poe or his family, or were portraits of them. Other items evoked his life and literature.
Such as this marble-and-bronze memorial to Poe.
The sign says, “… Edwin Booth, on behalf of the actors of New York, presented this monument to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1885 in memory of Poe…” Eventually, I guess, the Met got tired of it, and it ended up in Richmond.
Or this bust of Pallas, a copy of a Roman sculpture. Can’t call yourself a Poe museum without that, though a depiction of Night’s Plutonian Shore would be good as well.
Poe himself in stone out in the garden.
The garden is a pretty little space. People get married there, apparently.
My own favorite item.
I haven’t seen The Raven, but a movie with Vincent Price and Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson, directed by Roger Corman, who did a lot of Poe-inspired movies, has to be worth a look.
Some time ago, I noticed that Ann not only had October 14 off — for Columbus Day, that barely there school and post office holiday — but the next day as well, one of those days on which the teachers come to school, but students don’t. According to the way I think, that meant an opportunity to go somewhere.
So on Friday, October 11, Ann and I flew to Richmond, Virginia, returning on the 15th, for what amounted to a U.S. history trip. Fitting for her especially, since she’s in an AP U.S. history class this year. Fitting for me, since the trip included destinations that I’ve wanted to visit for a long time, but never gotten around to.
On Saturday, we spent the day in Richmond — partly downtown, at Capitol Square, where we toured the Jefferson-designed capitol, and at the newly opened American Civil War Museum, which includes part of the ruins of the Tredeger Iron Works, cannon and locomotive maker of the Confederacy.
Navigating downtown Richmond in a car proved to be pain in the ass, with its high volume of traffic, limited parking and numerous one-way streets. Every other street seemed partially blocked by construction, either of buildings or the street itself. Also, the Richmond Folk Festival was that weekend — and a lot of folks showed up for it, crowding the area near the riverfront, where the American Civil War Museum happens to be.
Downtown, as seen from the steep banks of the James River.
Despite traffic snarls, Richmond struck me as an interesting city, full of life in the present and echoes of its storied past. A day wasn’t nearly enough, but there were other places we wanted to see in Virginia.
On Sunday, we drove to Charlottesville, with Monticello as the main destination. For Ann, a completely new experience. For me, a second visit. But the first time was in 1988, so I’d forgotten a lot. And some things have changed there.
We also visited the University of Virginia that day, which I didn’t do more than 30 years ago (not sure why not). See one famed Jefferson site, best to see another close by. Closer than I realized: from Monticello you can just see the white dome of the Rotunda, the school’s most famous structure.
On the third day, technically Columbus Day Observed, we drove the other direction from Richmond to Williamsburg. More specifically, Colonial Williamsburg, the open-air museum of large scale and ambition, an odd amalgam of past and present.
There’s a lot to Colonial Williamsburg, including structures and displays and artifacts and craft demonstrations, but also programs by reenactors. The high point of the visit was one such, held at a reconstructed 18th-century tavern and featuring the Marquis de Lafayette and James Armistead Lafayette.
Afterward, they were willing to pose for pictures.
On October 15, we flew home in the afternoon. In the morning, I drove by myself to a place I’ve wanted to visit for years, the Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, a stunningly beautiful cemetery perched on a hillside above the James River, populated by numerous historic figures.
After Ann woke up and we checked out of our room, we visited one last spot in Richmond: the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, small but compelling, managing to convey the misery of his life and the legacy of his art.
For all its faux Bavarian tourist appeal, Frankenmuth, Michigan has an actual Bavarian history, beginning with St. Lorenz Lutheran Church, about a half a mile from crowded Main Street.
We were the only ones there for about half an hour around noon on Labor Day.
The church was founded at the same time as the town. “Pastor Wilhelm Loehe of Neuendettelsau, Bavaria, was inspired to establish a German Lutheran colony by Michigan circuit riders who requested aid in bringing the Gospel of Christ to Saginaw Valley Chippewa Indians,” the site’s historic plaque says, as reproduced here.
“Directed by Loehe in 1845, Pastor August Craemer and fourteen other immigrants began clearing forests in this area south to the Cass River. They built log houses and dedicated a log church on Christmas Day 1846. The second church, a frame structure, was erected in 1852 and enlarged in 1864, serving until the completion of the present church in 1880.”
A Cleveland architect named C.H. Griese designed the current Gothic Revival church. Traces of him are online, such as in the context of another Lutheran church.
We were glad to find out that the building was open. That’s not always the case, often for good reason. The interior’s handsome indeed.
Excellent stained glass as well, signed by Hollman City Glass of Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Pastor Loehe makes an appearance in glass.
I suspect this depiction of him is unique in all the world.
C.F.W. Walther, first president of the Missouri Synod, is also in glass. He’s probably englassed in other Lutheran churches.
The settlers came to the Saginaw Valley, built their homes, farmed the land, attended St. Lorenz, and when the time came, were buried in its churchyard.
Those are almost all 19th-century stones, near the site of the first two church buildings, and across the street from the current church. A larger cemetery with newer stones is on the same side of the street as the current church.
The permanent residents are every bit as German as you’d expect: Bauer, Bicker, Fischer, Herzog, Hochthanner, Hubinger, Kern, Roth, Reinert, Weiss, usw. Loehe and Craemer aren’t among them, Find a Grave tells me. Loehe is in Bavaria and Craemer is in St. Louis.