A cold and frosty morning

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 19^th 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.