Now lemme get this straight

Guys, guys, guys—

What should I do?

Stealth advertising

This struck me while I was driving around NoVa a while ago: some sort of stealth contact system:

I mean—no direct/mobile, no office and no website.

Maybe you’re meant to stop them in traffic and strike up a conversation. Or send up the bat light. I’d imagine that it’s hard to drive lead generation this way, but I could be wrong.

Mouths filled with laughter

Let’s cap off this Advent season with the really big gun of Christmas music. The Christmas Oratorio by Johann Sebastian Bach.

“Unser Mund sei vol Lachens”—“Let our mouth be full of laughter” is the theme, which seems appropriate. Mary and Joseph made it to Bethlehem, they found a place to spend the night, the prophecies have been fulfilled. The final chorale is “Gelobt sei Gott”, “God be praised”, which says it all.

Here we’ve got the J.S. Bach Foundation of St. Gallen, Switzerland, performing the oratorio in a church in Trogen. I do not know why they feel obliged to point out that it’s a Protestant church (all their videos on YouTube seem to be so designated), but it’s a good recording nonetheless.

It’s time to pull out the stops, crank up the volume and rejoice.

Beautiful Hanukkah

As I mentioned yesterday, Hanukkah began at sundown on Sunday. I missed a Hanukkah post because the 22^nd was also Annunciation Sunday, and the yahrzeit of my friend David’s death. But the beauty of Hanukkah is that it lasts for eight nights, so I’m still in the bracket.

So my music today is “Ocho Kandelikas”, which is a Ladino Hanukkah song. Ladino is the language of Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. (We’re more familiar with Yiddish, which is the language of Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe.) Just as you can limp along understanding Yiddish if you speak German, if you speak Spanish, a lot of Ladino words will make sense.

So, “Ocho Kandelikas” means “Eight Candles”.

The song was written in 1983 by a Bosnian named Flory Jagoda, who fled with her family following the Nazi invasion of then-Yugoslavia. She married an American soldier after the war and lives somewhere in Northern Virginia (according to Wikipedia).

The lyrics are not rocket science; I think a lot of the attraction is the energetic tempo. Although I cannot argue with the line, “We’re going to eat little pastries with small almonds and honey.”

Here is “Pink Martini” performing it. Crank up the volume and let loose a little.

Gratitude Monday: Giving thanks for all God's graces

My friend David, who died two years ago yesterday, despised religion. But he also had two young sons, so I know he celebrated Christmas, after a fashion. Well, his partner was Jewish—maybe the light sabers the boys got one year were for Hanukkah (which also began last night). I dunno.

Regardless, I think David would appreciate today’s Advent piece, “The Rebel Jesus”. Jackson Browne wrote it for the Chieftains’ 1991 Christmas CD, The Bells of Dublin.

The lyrics certainly apply to the state of Christmas and evangelical Christianity today—where the money-changers that Jesus threw out of the temple have taken over mega-churches to preach the gospel of prosperity. Well, prosperity for them, at least. Guarding the world with locks and guns—check. Guarding fine possessions—yepper. The kill shot, though, is the line about anyone interfering with the business of why the poor are poor: “they get the same as the rebel Jesus.”

If anything, that’s only got worse in the decades since this song was released. That gospel of prosperity’s added an amendment: if I can’t be prosperous, please, God, at least make someone else worse off than me.

David understood that acutely.

Well, here’s the cut from that Chieftains album.

And I’m still grateful for my friendship with David. What a grace that was.

Most highly-favored lady

Well, we’re rounding the turn into the final stretch of Advent. Today is Annunciation Sunday, the night we light the fourth candle in the wreath and consider what it might have been like for a very young woman in Nazareth to be paid a visit by one of God’s biggest guns, the Archangel Gabriel.

Gabriel was one of the guardians of Israel. In the Old Testament, he appeared to Daniel, to interpret his visions. He also was sent (as recounted in the Book of Ezekiel) to destroy Jerusalem. In the New Testament, he appeared to Zacharias, to tell him that his wife Elisabeth would bear a child (John the Baptist). Elisabeth being Mary’s cousin, I suppose it’s possible she’d heard about Gabriel’s visit, so maybe she wasn’t completely laid out by having an archangel show up in her room and telling her that she’d been chosen to bear the son of God. Without any kind of sexual activity.

Well, maybe, but I think it must still have been quite the BFD back in those days, in the backwater of civilization, and it must have been overwhelming.

“Gabriel’s Message” is a Basque carol that’s based on a 13^th Century Latin carol. I’m giving you Sting’s take on it.