Little miracles

Since today is the feast day of Saint Nicholas, let’s talk about him a bit.

It’s actually hard to see past the rotund Jolly Old Saint Nick that we’ve had in our minds ever since C. Clement Moore’s “A Visit from Saint Nicholas”, and the Coca Cola adverts from the 40s. The historic Saint Nicholas was a third-century bishop of Myra in Asia Minor (now in Turkey). Nicholas was reputed to have performed a number of miracles, including restoring three murdered and dismembered boys to life, and secretly tossing purses of gold through the window of a poor man who couldn’t afford dowries for his three daughters and was about to sell them into prostitution. He’s also known for bargaining with sailors for a portion of their shipment of grain (needed for a time of famine)—they were reluctant to give away any part of their consignment, but he promised they wouldn’t lose by helping those in need. When they arrived at their destination, the weight of their shipment was exactly what it had been before they met Nicholas, and the wheat given him was enough to last Myra for two years.

Nicholas is the patron of sailors, fishermen and merchants (tied to that last miracle); children, brewers and coopers (the dismembered boys had been put into a barrel to be brined); pharmacists, archers and pawnbrokers; broadcasters and the falsely accused (this would be a single group these days); and repentant thieves. He also is patron of Russia, Greece, Liverpool, Moscow, Amsterdam and Aberdeen (among other places).

We of course associate him with gift giving these days. Some traditions receive presents on Saint Nicholas Day, rather than Christmas, but this largesse does not come without a down side. The good saint is typically accompanied by a demon—called Krampus in some places and Zwarte Piet in others—who hands out punishment to the bad children, while the saint gives the goodies.

As Santa Claus (morphed from the Dutch Sinterklaas—Saint Nicholas), he’s the embodiment of our contemporary Christmas machine: we tell kids he has a toy workshop at the North Pole, staffed by elves and with transportation courtesy of reindeer. He holds court at every mall and most department stores in the country, and presides over countless holiday parties where people overindulge in pretty much everything.

In Québec last Sunday I came across a different iteration of him. This guy was parked on a throne in a street with his two dogs and a basket in front full of Canadian five-dollar bills:

  

Saint Nick was open for photo ops:

An hour or two later I happened by again and watched him head home, where I’m thinking he banked a haul that was well into three figures.

It’s hard to find music about Saint Nicholas—Google it and you get 3,478,622 hits on “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas.” No; just no.

What I’m going with is the Dutch song “Sinterklaas Kapoentj”, which featured in one of my favorite Christmas movies. I vastly prefer Miracle on 34^th Street over It’s a Wonderful Life, and this is one of the seminal scenes:

If that’s not enough, here’s a different version, by a trio of Dutch puppets; a bird, a mole and what looks like a worm:

Through his own redeeming love

Today’s piece is a staple of the “Lessons and Carols” service that Anglican churches (and some others) put on this time of year.

I can remember driving up to New Jersey from Williamsburg one year, and listening via NPR stations to the broadcast of this service from Kings College, Cambridge, which seems to be the big dog in Lessons and Carols services. As we drove away from one station’s signal, we’d pick the broadcast up on another one.

The format for “Once in Royal David’s City” is standard: single boy soprano sings the first verse solo and acapella, then the choir/congregation join in. Finally, the big blowout final verse, with descant. In my opinion, it don’t get much better than this. Youse’ll want to crank up the volume.

When all the birds had fled

Let’s have one more from Canada for today’s Advent music. What we know as “The Huron Carol” was written by Jean de Brébeuf, a Jesuit missionary to the Huron/Wendat people, in 1642. Since its Wendat title translates as “Jesus, he is born”, it’s not, technically, an Advent carol. But since I am, technically, in Québec, I’m slotting it in here.

The version I’m giving you is sung by Heather Dale, a Canadian Celtic musician, in Wendat, French and English.

Gratitude Monday: en compagnie de tous saints

A few weeks ago, I woke up and decided I wanted to step away. From work, from going to-and-from, from my life, basically. As of this week, I’ve been at my job two years, and I’ve taken a grand total of seven days off; two of those were to go house hunting and three more were to move house. The world has been closing in around me, and I felt like I should give it a good shove.

Seeing as to how I got my Global Entry status last month, I thought I ought to take it for a ride. This meant, at a minimum, that I would have to get on a plane, preferably to somewhere not in the United States. (This was a way of preventing me from just staying at home, sleeping in and mooching around. Doing that would not help WRT pushing back the world.) I didn’t feel up to a trans-Atlantic flight, but Canada I could handle. I used to work for a company headquartered outside of Ottawa, so I’d been there, and to Toronto, but never to Francophone Canada. Ergo Québec City.

To get there from The District They Call Columbia, I had to take two flights, the second on a teeny prop plane. I speak French, but I was reminded of an expression one of my professors used about impure pronunciation: il parle comme une vache espagnole. It makes sense: Québecois:Français::American:UK English. But as I eavesdropped on my fellow passengers I thought to myself: man—québecois: je suis croque madame.

Still, people do appreciate that one makes the effort, and surrounding myself with a species of French helped with the stepping away. I had constant reminders of my mission, walking along rue Saint-Pierre, rue Saint-Joseph, rue Saint-Roch, rue Saint-Antoine; I was surrounded by saints. Also, the fact that the temperatures hovered on either side of 0ºC, with snow on the ground did, too.

I won’t bore you with all the details here, and I’ll spread out the photos, too. But let me say: mission accomplished. I left behind the idiocy of US politics, work and quotidian struggles, breathed totally different air, drank bowls of café au lait with my breakfast and wandered where I liked, when I liked. I’m grateful for having the opportunity and the wherewithal—and for screwing my courage to the sticking place—to do it.

Oh, alright, then—just one photo.

I was able to get a little Christmas shopping done.

Venez, venez, venez

Huh. It’s That Time again.

Yep, it’s Advent, so you know what that means—seasonal music. For the season of preparation and reflection. And since I’m currently in Québec City, let’s start this off with something en français.

“Venez, divin Messie” was written by abbé Simon-Joseph Pellegrin in the late 17^th Century, with a melody that dates from about that time. It appears in many anglophone hymnbooks as “O Come, Divine Messiah”, and it fits in with the seasonal theme of preparing for the Saviour’s birth. It’s got quite a lively, almost jolly, feel to it. I picture it as something you might listen to while cleaning your house for holiday visitors, cranking up the volume so you can hear it over your vacuum cleaner.

It’s got five verses plus the refrain, so I’ll only give you a bit of the French.

Venez, divin Messie

Sauvez nos jours infortunés,

Venez source de Vie

Venez, venez, venez!

Ah! Descendez, hâtez vos pas;

Sauvez les hommes du trépas,

Secourez-nous, ne tardez pas.

Dans une peine extreme,

Gémissent nos coeurs affligés.

Venez Bonté Suprême,

Venez, venez, venez!

You’ll notice the repeated “venez”—come! The singer is so eager to welcome the Messiah, s/he just can’t wait.

Here’s that bit as it appears in English hymnbooks:

O come, divine Messiah!

The world in silence waits the day

When hope shall sing its triumph,

And sadness flee away.

Dear Savior haste;

Come, come to earth,

Dispel the night and show your face,

And bid us hail the dawn of grace.

TBH, the English text looks like it’s just a whole different thing. Here’s how I’d translate:

O come, divine Messiah

Rescue us from our unhappiness.

O come, source of life

Come, come, come.

Come down, hurry your steps,

Save mankind from death.

Help us, don’t delay

Our afflicted hearts

Groan in extreme pain

Come, Supreme Good

Come, come, come.

Well, I get it—hard to fit an exact translation into a good tune. So just have a listen. With or without the vacuum cleaner.

Special delivery

Huh. Things are looking up in the environs of the District They Call Columbia.

I confess that I only occasionally look at the ads on Metro cars. I’m either nose down in my mobile, or I’m gazing emptily into the space beyond the window.

But the other morning I glanced up at the big stretch of blue next to the door and saw this:

Then a couple of days later, there was this one:

Now, this certainly looks good—and Lord knows, home delivery of hot and cold running booze is a super-good use of tech. Talk about meeting a market need...

But I went on their website, and—as I expected—they cannot deliver liquor (or even, apparently, beer) to Virginia. Those Baptist Taliban anti-liquor laws. Also, they don’t want you circumventing their state-run ABC (liquor) stores.

(I noticed on their website once that they forbid anyone bringing in more than a gallon of anything alcoholic (including wine and beer) from outside the Commonwealth. If you’re moving from another state or from abroad, you have to fill out some kind of form to get their permission. Yeah, no.)

However, it is possible for MinibarDelivery.com to deliver to my work address, in the District. Which could certainly be a boon. Although my manager might get a little sniffy. (I mentioned once I was going to pick up a bottle of Glenmorangie for… And he interrupted me to ask if I had a problem, and if he needed to contact HR. I stopped telling him anything about anything.)

So I’ll keep this one in my back pocket.

In tequila veritas

You know, I have to say that, when it comes to tequila, I agree with this response:

Winter is here

I’m not even sure how to start this one out. As you know, the season known as The Holidays is upon us. (In the United States, it’s generally considered that Thanksgiving kicks it off, although it might now be starting at Halloween.) This means holiday decorations. And in the District They Call Columbia, the big megillah is the decoration of the White House.

Dunno if there were great expectations of how the unchurched Kleptocrat would manifest his declaration during the campaign last year that there’d be no more “Happy Holidays” crap if he was elected; strictly “Merry Christmas” all the way. But Monday, while he insulted several Navaho Code Talkers under a portrait of Andrew Jackson, his wife invited reporters (and a few carefully-chosen photo-op children) to witness their idea of the season.

Let me just say: clearly, it would be harder to find a whiter Christmas than this, so a perfect expression of the white-supremacist-in-chief.

But don’t take my word for it. Here was Twitter, starting with the rather wistfully hopeful tweet by Melania’s director of communications.

You sort of got the feeling that Grisham was crossing her fingers, praying that she wouldn’t get trolled. However, she was wrong. So wrong.

Because—holy White Witch, how could anyone in the decorating chain of command have thought that this design would be seen as…anything but an evocation of cracking ice and frozen corpses? (Perhaps they hoped we’d be so grateful not to find gold-spray-painted putti covering every surface, interspersed with handwritten paeans by Cabinet members and the Joint Chiefs of Staff declaring their eternal fealty to the orange Chaos Monkey that we wouldn’t say anything about something that emerged from an Ingmar Bergman nightmare? Yeah, no.)

As Elle magazine quipped, decorating's a snap when you get the Orcs involved.

At any rate, Imma just leave these here.

This one I thought particularly apt.

 And a couple of comments:

“It looks like Christmas on the Death Star.”

“This is the actual war on Christmas, right here.”

“About as warm as a penguin’s ass.”

“Treason’s Greetings!”

We can expect more as we proceed through the next month. Kind of like passing into the mines of Khazad-dûm.

Comma gain?

Whether the world ends in a bang or a whimper, I’m beginning to think that the cause will be an argument over the Oxford comma that gets out of hand.

I see cases made for either side passing on my social feeds, and I laugh them off because I’m firmly in the AP Style camp, and whatever anyone else does I know I’m getting into heaven.

However, this one rather struck my fancy, as someone pointed out something untoward in the Royal Navy’s profile, and who might find it disturbing.

Gratitude Monday: security

Huh. As I mentioned last week, I did not go out shopping on Black Friday. However, apparently my American Express card did.

I fired up the email account I use for subscriptions, web transactions and listservs on Friday to find two notifications from Amex of a questionable charge late Thursday. The emails looked legit, having both my actual name as on the account, and appropriate email address, but because I get faux-Amex phishing attempts about once every six weeks, I still didn’t click on the “this is indeed fraud” button, I called their customer service line.

In the process of being verified, I had to haul out my mobile phone, and found three texts and a voicemail from them about the fraud. (Which I’ll have to deal with, because I’ve told them that I very seldom actually have that phone on, so it’s not a good mechanism for communicating with me.) This is an indicator of how seriously on top of things they are.

(By contrast, NatWest Bank in the UK waited two weeks of processing totally out-of-character charges on my debit card before sending me a letter via snail mail to ask if these were, by any chance, legit. They were not happy about having to eat the fraudulent £750, but tough toenails.)

Anyhow, Sean with Amex fraud protection walked me through verifying actual purchases by me and pinpointing the attempted fraud. This followed what I’ve heard is the typical pattern: a $1 charge somewhere to see if the account is active, then a much larger one—in this case, $455.79 at Target online. Amex didn’t let that charge go through, and they made the six attempts to contact me about it.

He also confirmed that the card wasn’t lost or stolen, that I didn’t “lend” it to anyone else, and that no one could have observed the digits. I do practice good security—online buying on SSL sites only (I look), shredding account statements and the like. This was probably someone going through a likely set of account numbers and seeing what would go through (ergo the $1 trial charge; with a construction company…).

Sean took care of the $455.79 plus $1 and then told me he’d send me a new card. At first he said he’d send it via USPS, and it would arrive on the 29^th. That’s just crazy talk, and I told him it would not do. (Seriously, dude? Look at my usage pattern. That puppy gets used four-five days a week. And we’re talking Black Friday and Cyber Monday. What? Are? You? Thinking?) So he put a rush on it, with delivery for Saturday; I had a new, metal card by 0940.

(I really don’t understand that send-it-by-USPS gambit. It’s called snail mail for a reason. And the last time this kind of thing happened—about five years ago—the Amex reps didn’t even mention mail as an option. Overnight it was —as it should be.)

Now here’s the thing: this is not the first time Amex has acted with dispatch when an uncharacteristic purchase shows up on my account. They run an exceptionally tight ship, with algorithms that must be a sight to behold. I shall now have to remember some new digits (when making online or phone purchases, I don’t even have to have my card out; I know the full account number and four-digit security code by heart, which on occasion has been, ah, very helpful), and will have to swap out the card on record with Amazon, but that is a small price to pay for the absence of hassle and reasonable sense of security that Amex has my back.

Definitely something to be grateful for.