Maybe three years ago, I
was in the Korean coffeeshop in the Valley They Call Silicon sometime early in
December. I loved the Paris
Baguette in a mostly-Korean strip mall in Santa Clara, partly because it
was great for people-watching and partly because of the excellent pastries. But
PB locations in Cupertino, San José and Palo Alto offered more or less the same
thing, and were all somewhat more up-market (even if San José’s and Palo Alto’s
coffee tasted worse than Starbucks’).
The thing I loved most
about PB Santa Clara was Kenyon, the store manager, who—the minute I walked
through the door and before I’d settled my laptop on a table near an electrical
outlet—would start making a decaf latte for me. If he was with a customer, he’d
have one of his staff do it, but whenever he was making it, there would be exquisite
latte art, even though it was a take-out cup with a lid on it.
Anyway, back to three
years ago. I was in PB, sipping my latte, listening to KDFC and writing, when I
took out my earbuds to visit the loo. I became aware that the store’s Sirius
station was playing Bing Crosby singing “Christmas in Killarney”. I thought
this a very interesting choice given that PB’s customer-facing crew were Asian
millennials on the young side of that demographic, and the baking staff looked
to be largely Latina.
So when Kenyon had a
break in serving customers I asked him who chooses the station. He had to stop
and actually listen to what was
playing, whereupon he kind of shrugged and said, “Management.”
Yeah, I can see that.
When I returned to my
table, I considered that if sitting in a Korean-owned French-themed bakery in California,
listening to “Christmas in Killarney” is not America in a microcosm, I don’t
know what is.
Which brings me to today’s
selection for Advent. No, it’s not Bing, nor is it “Christmas in Killarney”. (I
nearly went into insulin shock listening to it.) But it is from Ireland, at
least this recording of it is. “Past Three O’Clock” is a carol set to a
traditional tune called “London Waits”.
And the “Waits” being
referred to is a category of watchmen common in England and Scotland from
Medieval times up until the 19th Century. City waites (the early
spelling) patrolled the streets using musical instruments to mark the hours. (Carrying
something musical also distinguished you from other bands of night-crawlers.)
It’s not clear to me how they knew, precisely, what hours they were sounding,
but apparently it worked quite well as a system for a number of centuries.
So, “London Waits” as a
melody captures the functions of the waits of that city, and George Ratcliffe
Woodward put words to it around the turn of the last century. It’s in The Cambridge Carol-Book, Being Fifty-Two
Songs for Christmas, Easter, and Other Seasons, published in 1924, so it’s
still somewhat new on the Christmas carol continuum, although—because of the
provenance of “London Waits”, it sounds much older.
This recording is from The Bells of Dublin, by The Chieftains,
and it features along with them the Renaissance Singers.
I like it fine. But I
wouldn’t push it onto Kenyon and his crew at Paris Baguette.
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