First listen
Excerpt:
A group of men and women in traditional embroidered dress took the stage at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 5, 1922, for a performance that the New York Tribune dubbed “a marvel of technical skill.” The New York Times called the music they made “simply spontaneous in origin and artistically harmonized.” The New York Herald described the costume-clad singers as expressing “a profound unanimity of feeling that aroused genuine emotion among the listeners.” The audience that cheered for encores and threw flowers on the stage didn’t know it at the time, but they had just heard what would eventually become one of the world’s most beloved and recognized Christmas songs: “Carol of the Bells.”
Onstage was the Ukrainian National Chorus conducted by Alexander Koshetz. At the end of Part 1 of the program at Carnegie Hall, they performed composer Mykola Leontovych’s arrangement of a traditional Ukrainian song the playbill called “Shtshedryk.” The audience likely also did not know that just over a year before the New York premiere, Leontovych had been assassinated by the Cheka—the Bolshevik secret police.
Now listen to this version:
Listening to this again may have changed how you feel about the music, or at least the thoughts listening to it provokes. Sometimes out of pain can come beauty whether in music, poetry, art, or writing.
I am about as far as I can manage to get into the spirit of the season. I am having a special Christmas Day lunch with five friends but, alas, both my dogs have been having diarrhea. I spent part of my morning cleaning up after them in my bedroom where I at least had the foresight to put a tarp on the floor so it was not as bad as it would have been cleaning carpet.
Pondering this is what Dr. Byrne (he’s retired but still actively writing), my professor in a course in existentialism I took when I was an undergraduate at Michigan State, might call deep stuff.
This is a quote that comes to mind:
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
Ever since I was about 13 I have been an abyss gazer. I understand what in my childhood led to this, and eventually led me to become a psychotherapist.
I know lots of people may be having a more joyous Christmas than I can manage because they refuse to pay attention to what Trump is doing. I find I can only manage to tune out thinking about the plague brought upon the nation and world by Donald Trump for more than a few hours of escapist TV watching or conversation. This reminds me of my favorite existentialist, Albert Camus who wrote The Plague (La Pesta) which uses a plague that hit the French Algerian city of Oran to examine through the characters to question the nature of destiny and the human condition.
I’m reminded of the Christmas truces that were called during various wars. The most famous story of one such brief ceasefire is from World War I.
This is from a History Today story
What Happened When WWI Paused for Christmas — 'Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before we were trying to kill!’
British machine gunner Bruce Bairnsfather, later a prominent cartoonist, wrote about it in his memoirs. Like most of his fellow infantrymen of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, he was spending the holiday eve shivering in the muck, trying to keep warm. He had spent a good part of the past few months fighting the Germans. And now, in a part of Belgium called Bois de Ploegsteert, he was crouched in a trench that stretched just three feet deep by three feet wide, his days and nights marked by an endless cycle of sleeplessness and fear, stale biscuits and cigarettes too wet to light.
“Here I was, in this horrible clay cavity,” Bairnsfather wrote, “…miles and miles from home. Cold, wet through and covered with mud.” There didn’t “seem the slightest chance of leaving—except in an ambulance.”
Then the singing started
At about 10 p.m., Bairnsfather noticed a noise. “I listened,” he recalled. “Away across the field, among the dark shadows beyond, I could hear the murmur of voices.” He turned to a fellow soldier in his trench and said, “Do you hear the Boches [Germans] kicking up that racket over there?”
“Yes,” came the reply. “They’ve been at it some time!”
The Germans were singing carols, as it was Christmas Eve. In the darkness, some of the British soldiers began to sing back. “Suddenly,” Bairnsfather recalled, “we heard a confused shouting from the other side. We all stopped to listen. The shout came again.” The voice was from an enemy soldier, speaking in English with a strong German accent. He was saying, “Come over here.”
One of the British sergeants answered: “You come half-way. I come half-way.”
(and they did….)
I can’t even imagine the equivalent of a Christmas truce between pro and. anti-Trump politicians. Trump was asked this morning if he prayed for Nancy Pelosi this year. His response to the reporter was “have a great year.” So much for a Christmas truce between these two.
There are a bunch of articles about on either side of whether families should or shouldn’t discuss politics over their holiday celebrations if some are pro and others are anti-Trump. VOX says not to avoid politics and this article says to avoid conflicts over politics. An article in BuzzFeed says you should argue with your pro-Trump relatives, while Trump wants his minions to confront their “snowflake” relatives.
I say it depends on the family.
If this photo is any indication I am not sure Donald and Melania are having a “perfect” Christmas:
We very clearly are a country that is as deeply divided as it was during the Civil War and civil rights struggle. The Civil War resulted in over 600,000 deaths, during the fight for civil rights 41 people were murdered and that number has already been surpassed by shooting insider by white nationalism.
So here I am sitting here writing with a Mac on my lap and my other Mac on the floor next to me, the later silently passing aromatic gas. I am counting the things I do have to be thankful for (I won’t bore you with a list but there are quite a few).
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy Kwanza to all