Hymnus Christmas Non-music Extravaganza
It’s Christmas time. There’s a currently a lack of mistletoe and/or wine.For the last six year –, basically since I stopped spending the immediate fortnight before Christmas at my parents house — the 25th has pounced out of the end of December like a mugger. There isn’t any build-up. It’s work, work, work, BANG xmas, at gunpoint, all up in your face demanding your wallet.
In the holiday seasons of my youth there were trees and Christmas music and fires and stuff. Now I am old and bitter, and the beautiful virgin snowfall is just another incovenience to take into account for the seven hour drive on Christmas eve. My gosh this sounds Grinchy and tragic when written down!
Well TBH I’m being just a tad melodramatic. We really are doing holidayish stuff, it’s just crammed into the week right before (hence starting RIGHT NOW). In fact, I started considering all this lost scent of pine while munching on a holiday gingerbread pig that G just churned out of the piggery (oven) in our kitchen. I even added a little bit of Christmassy MP3ing to the room. Sort of. Since we don’t have a Douglas fir or tinsel out it’s probably not a huge surprise that I don’t have gigabytes of xmas music, either.
I do have this, though:
The last piece of which is the Hymnis Amoris for male and female choirs and soloists. It’s all about love and stuff, which I suppose is kinda appropriate for the “peace and goodwill to all mankind etc.” crowd. I remember having that CD on repeat in my car last winter. Even driving around with the windshield icing up became cosy and comforting. It’s a good one. It has to be the choirs which make it so instantly Christmassy.
Although not every piece with choirs has the same effect….
Any other examples of terrifyingly anti-xmas choral music ?
Back again, again.
Well hi there.
My, how you’ve grown! It’s been such a long time since we last met, every day felt like an eternity, etc, &c, and so on. I have a pile of ideas that wanted to get conveyed, and will be, perhaps: CDs that rejected doubts about composers; meme taggings; long and wistful monologues about the symbolic use of Beethoven’s ninth in Die Hard. It’s all stacked up in the mental out-box, or to-do-box, or some other hyphenated box.
When I don’t write for a while I sort of forget how to do it. Not the actual tap-tapping of keys, but the linking of thoughts to characters. The turning of ideas into words. It feels a bit like building a flight of stairs, one at a time — balancing precariously on the last as you clumsily hammer bent nails into the next plank. I was going to continue that simile, but un-ironically spent several minutes typing and erasing and retyping a series of failed continuations.
That’s why I’m not really writing about much of substance in this post. It’s just exercise typing, a warm up. Getting the joints flexible for next time.
After all, writing-related injuries can be nasty.