Tag Archives: Christmas

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

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A fine Christmas to all. Back again on Boxing Day or so. This year the holiday’s a little sad, but a drop of melancholy has its place in the occasion even in ordinary years. The season’s endless commercial messages deny that, of course, but to quote the Dread Pirate Roberts, “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

I like this version, the one that introduced the song, especially for the line, which was dropped in later versions: “Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.”

Christmas Tintinnabulation

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Ann wanted to go to the library last night, and when we got there we chanced on a performance of the Random Ringers, a handbell ensemble. They were playing in a part of the Schaumburg Township Library sometimes given over to movies and small concerts, with about 50 people watching.

The ringers were more than half finished when we got there. Ann wasn’t especially charmed by the music, but I insisted on staying for a few songs, because I liked them—especially the large bells. The handy “Major American Handbells Sizes and Weights for Diatonic Pitches” says that the bells can weigh as little as 7 oz. or more than 18 lbs. I’m not sure the largest of the Random Ringers’ bells were at the large end of that scale, but they looked big enough to be weapons.

The Random Ringers include 12 performers and a conductor, Beth McFarland of Mundelein, Ill. “Random Ringers is a community-based choir and not affiliated with any religious environment, but most members ring in their own churches,” says the concert program (leaflet, really). “Members hail from the North and Northwest suburbs and practice in Arlington Heights each Monday night.”

We heard “Welcome Christmas,” “Good Christian Men Rejoice,” “He is Born” and “Silent Night.” A fine tintinnabulation, it was.

Winter Begins With No Bang

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Been rugging up for winter lately: heater cleaned and inspected, gutters cleared of leaf debris to prevent ice dams, some tube sand and a snow shovel put in position outside the back door, heavy coats rotated back into easily accessed locations—and what did we get on the first day of meteorological winter, December 1, 2012? Overcast skies in the afternoon, temps in the 50s, and rain in the evening. Today, it was even warmer, nearly 60 degrees F. Early December isn’t always like this.

It is fairly cold at night, however, and I needed to go out into the back yard briefly at about 12:30 a.m. on December 1, and there he was: Orion, riding high in the south, followed by his loyal dog. That mark of coming winter isn’t going to change according to the vicissitudes of local weather.

The mild daytime temps meant I could string Christmas lights on the front yard bushes without freezing any fingers. Out of two outdoor strings with C9 lights—another string is battery-power LEDs—fully 13 bulbs were dead. So I went to a large retailer, looking for replacement bulbs. They had none. I looked fairly carefully to make sure, and found none, but a lot of full sets for sale.

What’s the thinking? Buy a new string, jack. We’ve got quasi-slave labor in Shanxi Province to keep busy.

I found replacement bulbs elsewhere, though not quite enough to replace all my missing ones, since buyers had cleared most of them from the shelves. Seems like there’s still a demand for C9s, despite the movement to LEDs.

It Isn’t Christmas in Branson Until Andy Says It Is

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The Andy Williams Moon River Theater in Branson is a theater, naturally, and a spacious and well-designed one, but it’s also an art gallery. I didn’t see everything, or even that many works, but included are paintings and sculptures by Willem de Kooning, Henry Moore, Kenneth Noland, Donald Roller Wilson, Jack Bush, Jacque Lipchitz, and Robert Motherwell. There’s also a collection of pre-modern (or maybe Meiji era) kimonos, which are in glass cases on the back wall of the theater. The nearby Moon River Grill also displays artwork, for that matter, with Andy Warhol works especially prominent.

The story I heard was that Andy Williams lived near Andy Warhol for a time in New York, and the singing Andy became friends with, and a patron of, Andy the artist. I hope that’s true, but in any case Andy collected Andy’s works.

We toured the theater, including some dressing rooms and the green room downstairs, and our guide told us that Andy William’s nickname, Mr. Christmas, wasn’t just about the Christmas specials he used to host. In Branson, the guide said, it wasn’t Christmas until Andy Williams said it was Christmas. For many years before his death, he said that Christmas began on November 1.

Marketing and his showman’s instincts must have been a factor in that date. But I suspect that he really wanted to see his theater, and the town, decked out for Christmas two months out of the year. And so it is. The town’s streets are adorned, lights are up everywhere, and the shows switch to Christmas iterations around the first of November. I’d prefer that Christmas not eat up early December, much less November, but Branson’s a whole other world, so I didn’t mind the early Christmas so much during my short stay, when the weather was warm and un-Christmas-like and Halloween had just ended.

Besides, when Branson decorates for Christmas, it pulls out all the stops. After dark in Silver Dollar City, for instance, you can see these kinds of lights.

It’d be churlish not to be impressed by all that, even in November.