Good evening, Kibitzers!
My current plan, as I write, is to not be here next Tuesday, so as to travel up to the Boston area early and spend some of my extra must-be-used vacation days with my family. If that works the way it’s supposed to, then I’ll be back on the 21st to join you for the Winter Solstice.
Times being as they are, it may also not work the way it’s supposed to, in which case I suppose I’ll be hanging around sadly in the thread next week, eating ice cream from the carton, but let’s just take the position that it will be okay.
In past Decembers, I’ve often picked a holiday song for the year, so this seems like a good time to do that. As noted annually, Christmas is not my religious holiday, but as an American, it is my cultural holiday. I take from it what I enjoy, and I encourage others to do so as well. (I really do recommend Alexandra Lynch’s 2015 Why this pagan celebrates Christmas.)
In last year’s diary, I reviewed the selections of past years, including Pablo Casals’ Song of the Birds; Melissa Etheridge’s O Night Divine (a Solstice reworking of O Holy Night); k.d. lang’s Barefoot (a snow-related love song); and a couple from Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox including this jazz medley of We Three Kings/O Come All Ye Faithful.
I added a track from Yo-Yo Ma’s very eclectic 2008 Songs of Joy & Peace — the traditional Irish Wexford Carol with vocal by Allison Krauss, and then tacked on Greg Lake’s I Believe in Father Christmas.
The point of all these songs, to me, is that they’re unlike the vast morass of Christmas music, so imagine my surprise this year to be dragging in here the most ploddy, boring, and endless Christmas song of all time. Except, I hasten to add, that’s not exactly what I’m doing.
I hate The Twelve Days of Christmas. I mean, it’s plainly intended for small children to sing, just like Old MacDonald Had a Farm, or the Sicilian Eh, Cumpari, because it’s both fun and educational for them to repeat all the accumulating verses. That’s fine.* But why, by all that’s holy, do I have to sit at a performance and listen to a grown-ass adult sing the whole thing?? NO one’s performance has the emotional range to make me want to hear that whole endless song done straight.
* It develops that the words were first published in 1780 as a chant, a children’s game as we speculated. Wikipedia has a handy chart enumerating the lyrical differences among an enormous number of published 18th and 19th century versions. Not until 1909 did some numbskull decide it needed to be a song.
Several generations of apostates, however, have realized the song needs to be re-adjusted before use as a performance piece. Changing up the gifts for something funnier can work. (I hadn’t heard this in decades, and it really brought back to me the look of 1960s bric-a-brac. The “hammered aluminum nutcracker” is :chef’s kiss:.) Allan Sherman, December 1963, The Jimmy Dean Show. [3:48]
Straight No Chaser were a student a cappella group at Indiana University when this performance was recorded in 1998. Their Twelve Days mashup rolled in a bunch of other holiday tunes and, ultimately, their popular Africa arrangement. They graduated and went about their business, replaced in the group by generations of new students. Not until 2006 did one of the original singers upload the 1998 video to YouTube, where it went viral and got them a five-album deal with Atlantic Records. The student group is called something else now. [3:30]
Here’s what initiated all this, though. New York Public Radio station WQXR, their classical station, can be streamed from anywhere, with several streams to choose from. In December, they add a “holiday channel”, and in fact, they now have a second such choice, “Holiday Standards”, which I’d characterize as jazz versions, old and new, of all manner of Christmas music. I generally stick with the classical holiday channel, and periodically I hear something I don’t have in my Amazon Christmas playlist.
“On the first day of Christmas...” doesn’t usually prompt me to listen, but this arrangement eventually broke through and caught my attention because it’s so clever and wide-ranging. It’s the Boston Pops, from their 2013 live album A Boston Pops Christmas - Live from Symphony Hall. It’s like some very musical person just free-associated on the gifts and their numbers, delving into classical, opera, ballet, Broadway, and Sousa marches, with a little Queen thrown in. (Later: and that person was David Chase, not the Sopranos guy but the musical-theater genius, another Harvard pre-med rescued from a life of crime medicine by Hasty Pudding.) [8:54]
[About the poll: the options are from the original 1780 gift list. “Colly” birds are black birds — they’re black as coal, coming from the same source as “collier” meaning a coal miner or a coal-carrying ship.]
This Holderness Family video, NOT based on The Twelve Days of Christmas, is actually from back in September, when you had a better chance of ordering merch if you got on it right away, but it’s still funny. [3:45]
Finally, there’s a chance to see Comet Leonard this month, before dawn this week and in early evening next week. And next week, the Geminid meteor shower will peak. Details from the JPL for those interested: [3:19]