#2 son has declared that the three most important things about Christmas are the feast, the presents, and fun time with the family, not necessarily in that order. Presents are all settled, we are having lots of fun, and now we also have the feast in hand.

Our Christmas Eve feast is a modification of the reveillon, the traditional French meal following midnight mass. We do not have midnight mass, so we start the feast – as we always did when I was a child — much earlier. But it is still very central to our celebrations.

We are having the local meat market make us a tray of meat and cheese, and the local French bakery is doing us a Buche de Noel (I can’t figure out how to make the right punctuation on my computer, but you know what I mean), some wonderful whole-grain breads, pate maison, and cornichons. We have been baking and making candy for days, and #1 son is in charge of crackers and chips and other such American additions. Some good raw fruits and vegetables, and we will be set.

It is wonderful to have a local butcher and baker. The butcher knows what kind of meatitude the kids prefer, and the baker (in charge, of course, of sweetitude) is kindly making a special version of his Buche de Noel which is kid-friendly — no liqueurs, and it is, he says, the flavors that kids like the best. It is wonderful to be able to walk in, greet the nice people, ask them to look after us, and leave in confidence that all will be well. I will be working on Christmas Eve, but #2 daughter will take the boys and visit the shops to pick up the goodies.

For Christmas day, we will go to grandmother’s house. I am making a mince pie, but this will be no effort, because we got the freshly-made filling from the afore-mentioned butcher. Grandma and Grandpa will make a ham and vegetables, and we will exchange our handmade gifts. I intend not to think about triglycerides at all till Epiphany.

What better song for a feast than “The Boar’s Head Carol”? This was published in 1521 by Wynken de Worde, and has been sung in Queen’s College at Oxford so steadily ever since that this tune for it is usually called the Queen’s College version. Here it is sung by the King’s Choir:

http://delongfarms.com/music/mp3/boar.html

Or, if you want the lyrics and melody so you can sing it yourself:

http://ingeb.org/songs/theboars.html

Do you feel the need for an artificial boar’s head to process around the table with? If so, click on this link and you can order one ready-made.

http://www.rentapeasant.fsnet.co.uk/food/boars-head.html

We are still working on grandparent’s gifts, and #2 daughter’s childhood friend is coming over today so they can finish up the cookie-baking. Knitting? I am still in some pain from the accident to my hand, so I took the opportunity to frog the Fair Isle, which has not in fact grown on me during my knitting hiatus. I’ll decide what to do with it after Christmas.

Mayflower (http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=mayflwr) has spoken up in defense of acrylic yarns, and expressed a desire to reach through her monitor and slap yarn snobs. Well, I’m opposed to snobbery in all forms, but I also don’t think people should knit beautiful complicated sweaters in 100% acrylic, and here’s why:

This nice little Viking-cable slipper was knitted in Red Heart yarn. It looked great when I finished it, but now, a year later, it has lost its looks and has little pills and puffs where the fiber has started to go to pieces. This is okay, because these were #2 son’s last-year slippers. He has outgrown them, and there is no one smaller than him to pass them down to.

Compare that with this detail from a dress I made for #1 daughter in 1985. This is a wool blend, not much more expensive than a 100% acrylic, but it washes so much better that now, almost 20 years later, after many washings and wearings, it still looks good.

I intend to send it to #1 daughter if she ever has a daughter. And she wore one of my little wool dresses that my grandmother made for my third birthday, too. So it is not snobbery, but good sense, to use wool or wool-blends when you knit something special that will be worn and washed a lot. Save the acrylic yarns for things which will not be washed much (nice bright chair throws and afghans, perhaps) or which will not need to last very long (stuff that will be outgrown soon and not passed along).

End of lecture.

You may have noticed that I don’t use people’s real names here. I use their xanga names, or the nicknames they have developed naturally at work or in the family, or sometimes a code name based on their middle name or something like that. Anyone who hasn’t earned a nickname of some sort probably won’t come up in the discussion. This provides the cast of characters, from “A” to “Zimbabwe Griddle,” and no nickname is used with unkind intentions.

But a new nickname developed over the past weekend. The new person is “Drool.” Now, the nickname is not based on drooling, and is in no way derogatory, but it seems likely that the person so named would not really like the sobriquet. Would you? I didn’t think so. Unfortunately, once someone has developed a nickname, it is almost impossible to change it, even if you try really hard. It is also almost impossible to ensure that the person so referenced will not find out about it.

I thought maybe we could spell it differently. “D’Rule,” for example, would offer a sort of hip-hop look that wouldn’t make people think of dripping saliva. Cleverboots suggested a Celtic spelling: “Dhruile” would have a Gaelic flair, wouldn’t it?

Continuing in this spirit, I offer you a simple Irish Christmas song, “That Night in Bethlehem”:

http://www.irishpage.com/noel/donoiche.htm

and the better-known “Wexford Carol”:

http://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/eire/goodpeop.htm

These two songs are traditional Irish pieces, both beautiful and very suitable for processionals, which is to say they will be just the thing if you are going out caroling. Alternatively, if you are attending celebrations of the Winter Solstice, you could play them on your penny whistle and be right in keeping. The Boys of the Lough and the Chieftans have recorded “That Night in Bethlehem” in Irish, and there are many many recordings of “The Wexford Carol” available in English. John Rutter has done a choral arrangement for it and included it on “A John Rutter Christmas.” I read that it is more properly known as “Enniscorthy Carol,” but I leave that debate for someone else to consider. The site for “That Night in Bethlehem” includes the original language, but I know enough about it to realize that I can’t guess from the spelling how to pronounce it. Therefore, I intend to sing them in English.

Why two songs? Well, it is the beginning of winter, and I know that I need at least two songs to give me the courage to face it. Mayflower is going to San Diego, where she will not need any courage for the winter, but the rest of us may need to spend a lot of hours by the fire with our penny whistles.

Messiah was a lot fun. The soloists were all very good (#2 daughter stood out for me, of course), the choir was as good as possible, the potluck breakfast beforehand was fun. We had The Emo King over for the weekend (sweetening up the tenor section), and he even offered to prepare Spam for us as part of our cultural exchange. We did not have Spam. Maybe next time. For this weekend — even though our work potluck was a marvel of healthiness — pizza, breakfast casseroles, turkey dinner, and Nesselrode pie were way more bad fats and bad carbs than I needed.

We played “Apples to Apples”, watched a movie, sang songs, and lazed around in between meals and rehearsals. After The Emo King set off for his home, we worked on homemade Christmas presents. A pleasant weekend.

#1 son complained that Christmas doesn’t feel the same as it used to, and said that it’s because we don’t do as much together any more. So he came to Messiah under duress, joined briefly in the Sunday afternoon craft project, refused to go shopping with his sister and brother or to see the lights with his sister and The Emo King, and spent Sunday evening in his room playing video games. He is fifteen. So I suppose the desire to join with the family and have those old holiday feelings wars with the desire to separate from the family and have those new getting-older feelings. I wish it were possible to fix that for him, but it is part of growing up, and not fixable — and I am thankful for how little trouble he’s having with it, considering how much some people have.

But it is an imperfection in Christmas. We have others. We had three deaths in the family this year, one particularly tragic, and we cannot help but think of that. My brother, who lost his wife, is intending to spend Christmas day alone in the woods, moping (he is not using that word) and so the rest of us will spend that day not only missing my sister-in-law, but missing and worrying about my brother as well. #1 daughter, having her first Christmas away from the family, will be alone on Christmas day while Son-in-Law is at work at the nuclear power plant. We are having our first Christmas without all our children present.

Our desire to have Christmas be perfect is not a reasonable one. It is a result of nostalgia for the days when our parents made holiday magic for us, combined with media images of perfection that have nothing to do with reality. Christmas is the most highly-orchestrated, heavily-planned thing we do, short of a wedding, and we want it to be just right. But it is also part of our real life. If our daily life is not perfect (and whose is?), then our Christmas won’t be either.

To me, that is just one more reason to give Christmas a spiritual focus. The worldly images of Christmas that we have are all far more difficult to achieve, and far less believable, than the spiritual ones. However, in honor of the imperfections of Christmas, today’s song is “Christmas Time is Here”:

http://yule_rejoice.tripod.com/c-lyrics/christmas_time_is_here.html

You know this, probably, as the Charlie Brown Christmas song. You might never have sung it, though, or even known what the words were. If you divorce it from the movie, you will find that it is a plaintive, almost a melancholy tune, with sweetly simple words about happiness. Do you have a jazz quartet hanging around your house today? If so, you have the perfect accompaniment. The piano will do, though, or you can just hum it in a thoughtful way as you get ready for work.

How about a science fiction carol? This may be the first and only you will ever see.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/ozarque/

Here’s a knitting carol, assuming you have a tune in mind for Clement Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas”:

http://knitting.xaviermusketeer.com/

I am not knitting, because I sliced my hand open, right at the base of my thumb. Spurred on by That Man’s story of a woman in his hometown who died of tetanus, I went and had a tetanus shot. The nurse assured me that I could do without stitches. My husband, who is a machinist and therefore well versed in these things, bought the right kind of Band-Aids and fixed it up for me. However, knitting is still beyond me.

That’s okay. It feels odd to sit with idle hands, but I have little sitting to do. Today I must get my Christmas cards mailed, make cioppino for the store potluck, order the Christmas Eve feast from the butcher and baker, go to the last Messiah rehearsal, then to the above-mentioned potluck, make something for tomorrow’s church potluck breakfast, fix a turkey dinner, and catch up on my baking. Tomorrow is the breakfast, the performance of Messiah, and candymaking. One more performance on Monday, and we’ll all finish making the grandparents’ gifts (had to wait till #2 daughter got home for that, of course). From there on, all is fun and frolic. For that matter, all these tasks will be fun and frolic in and of themselves.

Yesterday I overheard a customer saying, in a long-suffering voice, “I don’t mind the occasional chant –” and I hope you don’t either, because I have another beautiful and austere hymn to remind us that we are still in Advent and the feast days have not yet begun. “Of the Father’s Love Begotten,” a plainsong which has evolved from 5th century beginnings, is the oldest song we have sung so far this season. Different people take it at different speeds. Here is a site with the words (helpfully broken up) and a midi that goes at quite a clip:

http://www.planetkc.com/puritan/Hymns/otflb.htm

The words were written in Latin by a Spaniard around 400 AD, adapted in the 9th and 11th centuries to fit changing theology and liturgical practices, and translated repeatedly in the 19th and 20th centuries, with current versions usually taking a little bit from each. The tune, “Divinum Mysterium,” is roughly 12th century, found in both Italy and Germany by the 13th century. The beauty of the result is timeless. This is perfect a capella, handy for those travelling now that classes are over.

A music student in Washington D.C. is singing in the subway. Beautifully. I heard him on NPR singing “In Dulci Jubilo,” a Medieval German carol translated by J. M. Neale to be the well-loved carol, “Good Christian Men, Rejoice.”

http://www.oremus.org/hymnal/g/g326.html

This carol typifies one of the areas of controversy in church music (and yes, there are quite a few areas of controversy). Should the words of hymns be changed to be inclusive? After all, this song was calling good Christian men to rejoice only because the women, being utterly unimportant, did not enter the writer’s head. If you read the Bible, you may be astonished to notice how frequently, and how atypically for the cultures of the times of its writing, women are mentioned. Women are cited by name and treated as of equal importance repeatedly in situations in which one would have expected only men to be mentioned. So why, the argument goes, seeing that God clearly cares about the women too, should we allow a medieval hymn-writer and a Victorian translator to cause us to behave as though we want the men to rejoice, and the women to go do the dishes?

In this song, there are quite a few good options, too. We can sing, as the Presbyterian hymnal does, “Good Christian friends, rejoice.” If that seems a little twee to us, we can say “Good Christians now rejoice” or “Good Christians all rejoice,” both of which scan and make sense. Later, the line “man is blessed” can be changed without loss of musicality or sense to “We are blessed.” I see absolutely no reason not to change this one.

In “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” you may have trouble changing “Pleased as man with man to dwell” into something inclusive, but it seems to me that people who resist the change for “In Dulci Jubilo” (including our choir director) are betraying sexism as well as unreasonable resistance to change. What do you think?

In any case, #2 daughter is coming home today, so I am rejoicing. I finished shopping for things to put in stockings (I started at the health food co-op, but had to be realistic and go to Target, where the staff appeared to have been up all night drinking coffee, and the woman who checked me out told me, at 8:00 am, to “have a nice night”), and have decided on the menu for the Christmas Eve feast — the reveillon. We can all rejoice in our salvation, of course, as the song intended, but there is room for rejoicing over worldly things as well.

Priorities can change. The imminent arrival of Pokey and The Emo King has caused me to think that perhaps a little attention to housekeeping and grocery shopping might be more essential this week than getting to the gym every day.

Chanthaboune says that she doesn’t have anything coordinated in her dorm room, but I am going to give you a peek into her room at home:

Now you have to imagine how it looks after her brothers have been using it for a TV and game room while she’s been away at school. Mentally add piles of boys’ clothes, myriad cups and plates, art supplies on the floor, sports drink bottles under the desk, hand weights by the bed…

Suffice it to say that it needs a little work before she gets here Friday night. 

Here is another lovely German hymn, “All My Heart This Night Rejoices.” This is my current favorite Christmas carol, because it is so beautiful. In fact, I have been waiting all year to sing it again. It is a 17th century song. I’ll tell you, they really knew how to put together a carol back then, didn’t they?

http://www.breadsite.org/hymns/Allmyhea.htm

Or, interlined and with the nice harmonies: http://christmassongbook.net/s2139b.asp

Paul Gerhardt wrote the words, and Catherine Winkworth translated them, as she did so many fine German hymns. This tune is by Johann Ebeling. Other tunes are sometimes used, but why would you want to?

A customer came in looking for charts of the Periodic Table. The Poster Queen found several for him. Then I helped him find number lines. “You have to go right back to the number lines,” he muttered. “The problem is that people don’t realize that zero is a number. It’s the most important number.”
I considered a light remark about the history of the discovery of zero, but this was not the direction his thoughts were taking.

“You know where you see numbers most?” he demanded.
Before I could come up with a suitable answer, he answered himself. “On the telephone keypad.”
I couldn’t imagine what sort of life he led, that he saw numbers more on the phone keypad than anywhere else, but I was beginning to think he was a few sandwiches short of a picnic. I smiled and walked back toward where there were other people.

He followed me. He pointed out the arrangement of numbers on the telephone. “You see? It makes people think that 0 comes after 9.” He began counting for us, very intently, beginning with zero. I smiled in a non-committal way and started bustling around. Sometimes that works.

Not in this case. He pointed to the computer keyboard. “See? See? Here, too, 0 looks like it comes after 9. That has to be changed!”

While we consider what to do about this problem, we can sing “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem.”

http://my.homewithgod.com/heavenlymidis/Christmas/bethlehemstar.html

I should warn you that the midi file at this site has a strange, robot-like quality. Well, even more strange and robot-like than usual. I was not able to find a better one, and I did not want you to do without this charming song just because of that. You can learn the tune from it and play it in this foot-stomping way if you want, or extrapolate to something more lyrical if you prefer.

I learned this song when I attended a small country church. The first time we visited, I and my two small daughters, we heard an ancient lady singing and playing the piano. She favored the old closed-throat style of singing, so she sounded like an arthritic crow. My daughters couldn’t imagine why she was allowed to make noises like that in church. Later, I had the opportunity to sing in a quartet with her. She sang bass, an octave above, and wanted me to sing tenor, an octave above, which I could not do without sounding a lot like her. There were two others, a man and a woman. Together we sounded like some kind of exhibit of the range of possible human voices. Blending was not an option. Nonetheless, we enjoyed singing together, and I got to learn how to sing that sort of shape note-cum-bluegrass music that you hear in small Southern country churches. An enjoyable kind of singing.

In my family, we like to sing this song pretty, but take your pick. If you have a fiddle, mandolin, banjo, guitar, or standing bass, then pull ‘em out. The song was written by Adger McDavid Pace and R. Fisher Boyce sometime in the 1940s, and has been recorded by Emmy Lou Harris, Patty Loveless, Chanticleer, and the Judds, among others.

The Fair Isle is in progress. I am resisting the temptation to pull out this version as well. I am trying to give it a fair shot. At the same time, I’m wondering what made me think I would grow to like variegated yarn, especially in a Fair Isle. The idea is that, in a few more inches, it will change from being a sort of muddled stripe into a wondrous muted pattern in which all the subsidiary patterning makes the overall design richer. It works for quilts.

I am doing more writing of Christmas cards and baking and cookie making for Christmas baskets, than I am knitting. And I am getting to the gym every day instead of cleaning house. Priorities…

Yesterday a customer, fruitlessly seeking a particular atlas, told me, “It’s no fun to have grandchildren any more.”

She was a Stage 3 shopper, of course, and they often no longer like the people they are buying gifts for, so I was going to offer rueful sympathy and let it go at that, but she asked me, “Do you have any?”
“Not yet,” I answered, “but I’m looking forward to it.”
“I was looking forward to it, too. I thought how much fun it would be to buy things for them. But it isn’t like that any more.”
“They have lists?” I guessed, thinking of the stressed parents and grandparents who come in apparently filling orders.
“You have to have the right model number, or their picky mothers return them. And they have so much stuff, they don’t even care.”
A sad silence ensued. “Maybe it’ll be better when they get older,” I hazarded.
“No. Then they’ll just want money.” She started out the door. “Thank you for being so helpful. I’m just a little bitter about this.”

Leonidas says, rightly, that working in retail can give you a jaded view of the holidays. But at some point you have to buy into it. Or refuse to.

Someone spoiled the children to the point where they are no longer fun to give things to. Someone made presents the center of the holiday. Someone changed the surprise of someone wanting to give you something into an entitlement — and it had better be the right thing. But once that has happened, it is very hard to get back out of it.

One of our choristers has let us know that we should all give $5 so a gift certificate to the mall can be bought for the director and the organist. I would never give anyone a gift certificate to the mall, and thoughtlessly ponying up for a group gift is not the same to me as carefully choosing or making a gift for someone out of love. But in many workplaces across the country, this is the custom. Or people draw names and are told to buy something — often with a specified price range — for someone they hardly know and may not even like. They then receive an item — of the exact monetary value as the item they have given — which, being bought for them by someone who was told to do so, is neither surprising nor exciting. It is very hard to refuse to participate in this kind of thing.

But it is only December 14th. It is not too late to choose what kind of Christmas to have.

Here you can hear actual people singing “O Magnum Mysterium,” a gorgeous motet by the Spanish Renaissance composer Tomas Luis de Victoria. I hope it gives you some contemplative moments. http://www.mab.jpn.org/musictex/chorus/tv_mysterium_e.html

There are many recordings of this piece. If you are not a Renaissance music fan in general, you might prefer Linda Ronstadt’s Christmas album. It is not the best available recording of this piece, but it is still very lovely, and it has “White Christmas” and suchlike, as well. This is a standard and in the public domain, so you can also easily find sheet music on the web as well as in your local library. However, while I like to imagine everyone who chances upon this blog singing the song of the day, I am not so delusional as to think that you are going to belt this out while you wrap your gifts today. We don’t even sing it at our house unless we are rehearsing it. So I hope you will enjoy listening to it instead.

The new Fair Isle got to the 7th row before I frogged it back to the ribbing. This yarn has now been a couple of inches into two different Alice Starmore designs before I decided I disliked it and took it out. So I am starting again, with a traditional Fair Isle plan instead. I am hoping that this stuff just isn’t suited to Starmore designs (well, maybe because I have five colors of it, not fifteen), and not that I flat out don’t like the yarn. It is my first venture with variegated yarns…

This is not a serious problem, I admit, but let’s face it, I have no serious problems. So I will take this opportunity to sing a good Christmas blues song, “Please Come Home for Christmas,” by Charles Brown and Gene Redd.

http://www.jamesness.com/pleasecomehome.html

I find it amusing that this song was written by Redd and Brown, but I am notoriously easily amused. It has been recorded by the Eagles, Mariah Carey, U2, Fiona Apple, Vonda Shephard, Pat Benetar, and all manner of other people. This song was written in 1960, but it can’t really be counted as a good modern carol. For one thing, it isn’t a carol. For another, the words are extremely cheesy. They cannot be appreciated as poetry, because as poetry they are rotten.

Don’t let this bother you! Look around — do you not have some distinctly cheesy decorations up? Come on — some silver lame? Red shaggy things with white fur on them?  I myself have a floppy stuffed reindeer leaning over the music stand on the organ. And are you not wearing, or planning to wear, a sparkly sweater or one with a silly intarsia snowman or something? Sweatpants with “Ho Ho Ho” imprinted on your bottom? Have you not eaten, or are you not planning to eat, some odd food in a holiday shape? Jello, perhaps?

Maybe someone out there is always restrained and elegant in their holiday celebrations, but for most of us there is a little over-the-top element somewhere in the holiday preparations. Let it show in your music, too! “Please Come Home,” like all blues songs, benefits from good singing, but is fun to sing badly as well, and has the advantage of being a good choice to play on the harmonica.

About a week ago, I saw a little trampoline by the curb, where people put things in hopes that someone else will pick it up and give it a home. I obliged, and tucked it into my trunk with a good deal of satisfaction. Several of my sons’ friends have trampolines, and the boys really enjoy jumping on them, so I thought I would clean it up and give it to them for Christmas.

By the time I got to work, it had occurred to me that a trampoline of the kind I was thinking of would not have fit into my trunk. I asked my colleagues about this curious miniature trampoline, and sure enough, people more informed than I knew that is was a piece of exercise equipment. I was a little disappointed, but I gave it to the kids anyway, figuring that they would still be able to enjoy it. Not a Christmas present, but just a fun gleaning.

They promptly set it up in the living room. It is directly in the path of travel for nearly everyone entering or leaving this room. So naturally, people jump on it. You are walking from the bedroom into the kitchen to make coffee in the morning, so of course you will jump a few times on your way. From the bathroom to the laundry room with dirty towels — a few jumps. From the computer to the couch — do the twist on it for a few minutes, just long enough for Gladys Knight and the Pips to sing “Jesus is Just All Right With Me.” 

Obviously, it cannot stay. It doesn’t go well with the decor. It will inconvenience older relatives who come to visit. It is silly. But while it is there, it is keeping us all light-hearted. Jumping on a little trampoline while singing “Please Come Home” is perfect. If there are no witnesses, you could pretend you are holding a microphone. I will not do that. I hate microphones, and only hold them when the director insists, so I’m clearly not going to pretend I have one. But #2 son would. And if you do, it will refresh you before you head out for your exams, or your shopping, or whatever trials your day contains.