Rejoice greatly

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.

 

 

Tracks in the snow

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”.

 

Its fairest bud unfolding

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 19^th Century by Catherine Winkworth. The music was composed by Herbert Howells in the last century. Here we have Ars Nova Copenhagen singing it.

 

 

Reelin' like a merry-go-round

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.

 UPDATE: They replaced the deer with a snowman.

We'll count all our blessings

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.

 

Gratitude Monday: I drink to thee

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”.

 

Healing in his wings

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 19^th Century hooked it up with Mendelssohn’s “Vaterland, in dinen Gauen”.

Crank up the volume and feel free to sing along.