If you’re reading this, it means you’re still alive and I say, bravo!
Well done to make it through this annus horribilis, starting with the
GQP-sponsored insurrection and carrying on with the GQP-encouraged anti-mask
anti-vax anti-reason mouth-breathers, the first instance in US history of an
unpeaceful transfer of power (thanks, GQP), the miasma of Big Lies (courtesy of
the GQP) and the onslaught of the Delta and Omicron variants overwhelming our
already-precarious for-profit healthcare system (not directly attributed to the
GQP, but man, did they ever exacerbate it).
And I, for one, am glad to be looking at it in
my rearview mirror.
This evening I’m clearing the decks for 2022 with my usual ritual
of burning
El Año Viejo—writing out a list of the pain, sorrow, chagrin, anger,
fear, pain, frustration and other negative things that happened this year…and
then setting it on fire.
The New Year then becomes a tabula rasa upon which I can create
love, kindness, generosity, joy and hope.
So I’m closing out this final Friday with “Auld Lang Syne”. In
this case sung by Rod Stewart at Stirling Castle. Because why not?
I was sitting in my livingroom, talking with a friend on the phone
a few weeks ago. My gaze out the patio door rested on the top of my neighbor’s bird
feeder pole and I thought, “Oh. A clump of leaves sitting on that pole.”
But the longer I looked at it, the more it came together along my
optic nerve.
“Owl! I have to get a picture! There’s an owl out there. I’ll call
you back! Have to get a photo. I’ll call you back!”
My friends are used to this kind of thing, so she acquiesced. I
mean—I was already hitting the End Call button and grabbing the Nikon.
Anyway—here it is:
Just gorgeous.
(I did call my friend back and we continued the conversation. As
one does. But I’m glad I got the shot. Some people walking by out back scared
it away and I haven’t seen it since. But I’ll be on the lookout.)
Since I’m catching you up on the neighbors, here are some clips from
a month ago. I heard some noises on the patio late at night, so I went down and
discovered an entire gang of trash pandas were engaged in nefarious activities.
What with Advent and all, I’ve fallen behind on my Wild Kingdom
postings. But a couple of weeks ago I came downstairs and noticed some activity
on the patio.
Well, look who it is:
I can’t now recall what I might have tossed outside after dinner
the night before. Don’t tell the neighbors, but when I have a lamb chop, I chew
as much as I can get off the bone and then chuck it onto the patio. Invariably,
it’s no longer there in the morning. Ditto the skin when I’ve roasted a salmon
fillet. So it might have been either, or something else entirely.
I hope you had a happy and healthy Christmas, if you celebrate. If
you don’t, I hope you got some down time that you could enjoy.
My gratitude for today is about the wonders that Nature provides
for me on my morning walks, and also for the serendipity that occurs when I shift
my focus from the path in front of me so I can truly appreciate them. Two
examples from last week:
Thursday I started out a little later than usual, nearly 0700. I’d
just about reached the point where I turn right, when I looked up in the sky
and saw a shooting star. The first ever I’ve seen on the hoof.
Yes, I know it wasn’t a star; it was a meteor hitting the earth’s
atmosphere and going out in a blaze of glory. But it was, in fact, glorious.
And had I not been at that point in my circuit and looking up, I’d have missed
it. Three more meters and it would have been outside my peripheral vision. But
it and I were in exactly the right place at precisely the right time.
(No pix because it literally lasted a couple of seconds.)
The other example is from Christmas morning, as I was pulling into
the cluster at the end of my walk. I realized that I was surrounded by a
symphony of bird song; those guys were swarming the treetops and singing their
beaks off. I did get a couple of clips (in between aircraft heading in to
Dulles) for your enjoyment.
Here’s the thing—as with the shooting star, I almost missed the
concert, because I tend to use my walking to rehash Things and plan Other
Things. But this time I let them penetrate my thoughts and was rewarded
mightily for it.
So I’m grateful for the beauty around me, for getting out every
morning into it and occasionally paying attention to it.
Well, alrighty then—here we are at the very day. Merry Christmas,
all.
And on the second Christmas of the pandemic, maybe we pull out all
the stops because we could use a lift. My sister sent it to me, and sharing
with you is the least I can do.
Messiah, in its entirety, with the American Bach Soloists at
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, where I once walked their labyrinth.
Crank up the volume and let the beauty wash over you.
One more sleep until Christmas. Perhaps appropriate to acknowledge that
this time of year can be difficult for people in the best of years, and we’ve not had
really good years for a couple of cycles. The global failure to inoculate a
sufficient portion of the population has brought us damned near a full alphabet
of variants. Healthcare systems throughout the world are hanging on by a
thread. It’s hard to muster up comfort and joy in the midst of grief and
anxiety.
I thought about this a while ago on my morning walk. I was at the
apogee of my circuit—meaning either way I turned I had a 30-minute walk to get
home—when precipitation stung my face like needles. Sleet; deep joy. But after
about five minutes I realized that the sun was shining, and when I looked up there was a huge
rainbow ahead of me—so wide I couldn’t capture it all at once on my mobile phone. And the
sleet stopped, so I was only marginally wetter than I normally am.
I took that as a Sign; reminding me that for most of us, crappy
times pass. Or at least that, in the midst of those times, there are rainbows, if you look up from the crap.
So my Advent music for today is Natalie MacMaster and Alison
Krauss performing MacMaster’s “Get Me Through December”.
A number of plants are associated with the Nativity; many were
ported over when Christianity coopted ancient winter festivals—holly, fir
trees, Yule logs, etc. But the Christmas rose comes from a legend surrounding
the actual birth: a shepherd named Madelon saw all these people heading for the
manger with gifts for the baby and wept because she had nothing to give. Her
tears falling on snowy ground sprang to life as a rose.
The white rose is sometimes associated with Mary and purity; red symbolizes
the blood of Christ, which will be shed at a later time.
I thought about all this when I came across a late-in-the-season
rose in my neighbor’s garden:
And for today’s Advent piece, let’s have “A Spotless Rose Is Blowing”,
one of the many carols and hymns translated from the German (it's related to one of my all-time favorites, Es ist ein Ros' entsprungen) in the 19th Century by Catherine
Winkworth. The music was composed by Herbert Howells in the last century. Here we have Ars Nova Copenhagen singing it.
Today’s Advent piece is, well, not really Adventy. But it
certainly is seasonal.
It’s Chuck Berry’s “Run, Rudolph, Run”, okay?
The song was written in 1958 by Johnny Marks and Marvin Brodie.
Marks also wrote “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, but I will not hold that
against him at the moment. It’s bluesy and rocky and just what we need to get
us jumpstarted.
I do have questions, tho. I mean—Rudolph as the “mastermind”?
Mastermind of what? And what’s he doing, asking the kids what they want for
Christmas? Isn’t that Santa’s job?
BTW—here’s a reindeer from my neighborhood. He appears to have had
two of his legs amputated, and I confess my first thought was “venison roast”.
I think the homeowners had a similar notion. The deer is now gone.
Today marks the Winter
Solstice in the northern hemisphere, the shortest day in the year. As someone
who’s out walking beginning around 0600 most mornings, I welcome the gradual lengthening
of the light, although it’ll be some time before it makes an actual difference to
the start of my outings.
Probably since the origins of
humanity, people have celebrated this annual event, giving thanks for the
return of the sun, gathering around bonfires, singing, banging on things,
eating and drinking. Before the domestication of fire to candles, followed by
gas lights and then by electricity, knowing that the hours of darkness would
not in fact continue to grow was comforting in a world full of perils.
Actually, now that I think of
it, not so different from Year II of COVID. Huh.
The festival we know as
Christmas was overlaid on older traditions; the birth of the Son of God has
perhaps more dramatic impact if it’s celebrated around the Solstice rather than
sometime in Spring, which makes more meteorological and astronomical sense. The
early Church accomplished two goals with the coopting: subsumed pagan sun
worship into Christian rites and gave themselves license to feast away the
longest nights of the year.
Our entry for Advent today is “Solstice
Carole”, by Kim Baryluk, sung by her folk group Wyrd Sisters. It’s more
reflective than roistering, but I think it suits the day. And night.
During my peregrinations in recent weeks, I’ve spent some time
thinking about how the world prepares for winter. Trees, shrubs and plants pare
back—dropping non-essential leaves and sometimes paring back to the very earth.
Insects and reptiles kinda disappear—I don’t know where they go and I don’t
care as long as I don’t stumble on the undisclosed location.
Birds and mammals, now—they stock up on food and drink, putting on
extra protective layers (the “rings” my
colleague mentioned) to see them through the cold months. Humans add in the
social element of meals, frequently including games and singing as a way of
staving off the cold and dark world around us. Viz. this little toerag:
This brings me to wassail, and to my gratitude this Monday.
Wassail, in case you are a little unclear, is one of the
approximately 12,347 variants on mulled cider or wine or beer or mead. Mulling
involves heating [mead, wine, beer or cider]; adding spices such as ginger,
nutmeg, cinnamon and the like; and topping it with a slice of toasted bread, as
a sop. (Sop: you know—like the toasted slices of baguette or croutons on the
top of soup. Think: French onion soup.)
Oh, and it’s drunk from one big, communal bowl. No germ theory
here.
Wassail dates back to Medieval times. I don’t know when all the
spices started to be added, because they would have been extraordinarily rare
and prohibitively expensive during that period. And I’m not sure about the
significance of the toast being white; white flour and bread were also very
expensive, and therefore only the very wealthy could afford it.
I’ve never had wassail, to my knowledge; at least, never anything
that announced itself as such. But every year around this time, I like to have
a mug or two of Glühwein, which is pre-spiced red wine that’s served at
Weihnachtsmärkte throughout Europe.
There is nothing like being out on a freezing December night, with
a mug of Glühwein in your hand, wandering up and down aisles of stalls with
Christmas gear of all types, and watching children go gaga.
The custom of wassailing—roving around the village singing and
demanding booze—is bifurcated. In apple and cider country in the west of
England, you go out to the orchards in mid-winter to, you know, wake them up.
To serve notice that the trees will have to shake off their winter sleep in a
couple of months, and get back to work, because those apples are key to the
local economy.
Wassailing through the village, otoh, focuses on a kind of
jolly-faced exchange between the peasants and the landlord class: here we’ve
come to wish you well (wassail comes from Old English, and means “be thou
hale”), oh—and have you got any food and drink on you? Great. Hand it over.
This explains all the verses in the song about wishing the master
all the best: a good year, a good piece of beef, a good Christmas pie, a good
crop of corn, blah, blah, blah. Just the slightest bit on the toadying side,
but hey—it’s Tradition.
So today I’m grateful for tradition, and for hot spiced wine and
cider to get us through the dark and the cold.
There are probably thousands of variants on the “Gloucester
Wassail” song, with hundreds of variants on the title. For today’s Advent
selection, I’ve chosen the Angel City Chorale. I love this group. If you’ve
never heard their
performance of “Africa”, you need to do it now. Well, right after their “Wassail
Song”.
As we round the corner into the last week before Christmas, let’s
pull out all the stops. I’m talking Charles Wesley, Felix Mendelssohn and King’s
College, Cambridge.
One tradition of the fourth Sunday in Advent focuses on angels, so
it seems appropriate to have one of the all-time barnburners of Christmas
carols, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”. This one, particularly with David
Willcocks’ descant.
Wesley wrote his “Hymn for Christmas Day” in 1739. He envisioned
it being set to solemn and slow music, but fortunately someone in the 19th
Century hooked it up with Mendelssohn’s “Vaterland, in dinen Gauen”.
We’re moving from the 16th Century to 1925 for today’s
Advent entry. Because it’s Bessie Smith singing “At the Christmas Ball”.
Smith was known as the Empress of the Blues, which is a powerful
statement, given that she died at the relatively young age of 43. I chose “At
the Christmas Ball” because of Smith’s iconic status, but also because a lot of
people get the blues during this season, and it seemed like they should be
represented here.
The lyrics—well, they’re kind of all over the place. But I like
the lines about not worrying too much if your dance partner “don’t act fair”,
just look around, because there are plenty more around the dance hall.
Well, I think it’s time for something substantially traditional
for Advent today. Hardly anything is more traditional than “God Rest Ye Merry,
Gentlemen”. (Note the comma placement; the song is telling us to lighten up,
not commenting on our existing state of jolliness.)
The carol dates from the 17th Century, when it was
associated with recusant (Roman) Catholic families in England. This was a time when "celebrating" Christmas (the word means "Christ's Mass) was dangerous; Puritans did not hold with such frippery. The melody we
know was hooked up to it about a hundred years later.
I could have given you a version from King’s College, Cambridge,
but then I came across Annie Lennox’s take, and I had to go with it. She
changes some of the wording in the second verse (I guess “Jewry” was a sticking
point?), but this is quite engaging.
Starting tonight and
continuing until Christmas Eve, Christians in Hispanoamérica (including in
Latino areas of the United States) will walk through neighborhoods enacting the
journey of Mary and Joseph seeking shelter at Bethlehem. They go from house to
house, asking if there’s room for them. House to house—until they reach the
designated “manger”—they are turned away. Finally, they are allowed in.
Whereupon everyone celebrates;
there’s usually a piñata, and refreshments for the adults, too.
Las Posadas (literally, “The
Inns”) is a lovely tradition. I remember going to one in LA’s Olvera Street
when I was in grade school. It seemed neighborly; especially as each night the
welcoming house is a different one, so nobody has to be a grinch all the time.
Today’s Advent entry is “Pidiendo
Posada”, which dates back at least 400 years. The sequence is that one group of
singers asks for shelter as Joseph, and the second group turns them away…until
the end.
The first exchange basically
goes:
“In the name of heaven, I beg
you for lodging
My beloved wife cannot walk”
“This is not an inn, so keep
going
I can’t open the door—you may be a rogue”
