"On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, two turtle doves ..."
After a hefty price increase in 2023, the turtledoves are taking a break from sticker-shock this year. Their $750.00 cost reflects their rarity.
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Every year, I love to show a video of the á capella group Straight No Chaser singing their own unique version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas." This year (just when you thought I couldn't come up with anything else) they gave us a refresh.
Today still feels a little like Christmas, only the stores are open, bustling continued consumer spending in spite of everything. I know, some people may think that's a concession to the over-commercialization of the holiday, but as we mentioned before, it's better than pretending it's anything other than Christmas.
Today is “Boxing Day” in Canada, the UK, and other nations of the present and former British Empire. Traditionally, Christmas Day was when the master of the house would give presents to his family. On the following day, he would arrange for leftovers from his great feast to be given to his domestic staff, in boxes that they could take home. Eventually, it became customary to box other gifts as well.
Whatever works.
Meanwhile, the Irish celebrate this as a national holiday, too, only as Saint Stephen's Day, honoring one of the seven deacons appointed in the Book of Acts, to assist the apostles in their ministry. He was stoned to death by the Jews -- no, not all of the Jews, just some of them, and all of those guys were Jews, alright already??? -- and so is known in the Churches of the East as the "Protomartyr," as he was the first recorded to die for the Faith. And let's not forget that "Good King Welceslas" of Bohemia went out on the feast of Stephen, when the snow lay on ground, yada yada yada ...
It is also when Irish children would go from house to house, begging pennies to bury the wren, a tiny little bird whose size and scale for burial is exaggerated for the occasion, as demonstrated in the above video of "The Cutty Wren" by Nowell Sing We Clear.
"On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, two turtle doves ..."
The Turtle Doves are the most volatile gift in the index this year, growing by 25% in price (to $750.00). Their cost increase reflects their rarity.
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I always love to show this video of the á capella group Straight No Chaser singing their own unique version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas."
Today still feels a little like Christmas, only the stores are open, bustling continued consumer spending in spite of everything. I know, some people may think that's a concession to the over-commercialization of the holiday, but as we mentioned before, it's better than pretending it's anything other than Christmas.
Today is “Boxing Day” in Canada, the UK, and other nations of the present and former British Empire. Traditionally, Christmas Day was when the master of the house would give presents to his family. On the following day, he would arrange for leftovers from his great feast to be given to his domestic staff, in boxes that they could take home. Eventually, it became customary to box other gifts as well.
Whatever works.
Meanwhile, the Irish celebrate this as a national holiday, too, only as Saint Stephen's Day, honoring one of the seven deacons appointed in the Book of Acts, to assist the apostles in their ministry. He was stoned to death by the Jews -- no, not all of the Jews, just some of them, and all of those guys were Jews, alright already??? -- and so is known in the Churches of the East as the "Protomartyr," as he was the first recorded to die for the Faith. And let's not forget that "Good King Welceslas" of Bohemia went out on the feast of Stephen, when the snow lay on ground, yada yada yada ...
It is also when Irish children would go from house to house, begging pennies to bury the wren, a tiny little bird whose size and scale for burial is exaggerated for the occasion, as demonstrated in the above video of "The Cutty Wren" by Nowell Sing We Clear.
"On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, two turtle doves ..."
Thanks in part to the rising cost of feed, you will be paying more for Two Turtledoves in 2022 (up 33.3 percent to $600.00).
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I always love to show this video of the á capella group Straight No Chaser singing their own unique version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas."
Today still feels a little like Christmas, only the stores are open, bustling continued consumer spending in spite of everything. I know, some people may think that's a concession to the over-commercialization of the holiday, but as we mentioned before, it's better than pretending it's anything other than Christmas.
Today is “Boxing Day” in Canada, the UK, and other nations of the present and former British Empire. Traditionally, Christmas Day was when the master of the house would give presents to his family. On the following day, he would arrange for leftovers from his great feast to be given to his domestic staff, in boxes that they could take home. Eventually, it became customary to box other gifts as well.
Whatever works.
Meanwhile, the Irish celebrate this as a national holiday, too, only as Saint Stephen's Day, honoring one of the seven deacons appointed in the Book of Acts, to assist the apostles in their ministry. He was stoned to death by the Jews -- no, not all of the Jews, just some of them, and all of those guys were Jews, alright already??? -- and so is known in the Churches of the East as the "Protomartyr," as he was the first recorded to die for the Faith. And let's not forget that "Good King Welceslas" of Bohemia went out on the feast of Stephen, when the snow lay on ground, yada yada yada ...
It is also when Irish children would go from house to house, begging pennies to bury the wren, a tiny little bird whose size and scale for burial is exaggerated for the occasion, as demonstrated in the above video of "The Cutty Wren" by Nowell Sing We Clear.
I always love to show this video of the á capella group Straight No Chaser singing their own unique version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas."
Today still feels a little like Christmas, only the stores are open, bustling continued consumer spending in spite of everything. I know, some people may think that's a concession to the over-commercialization of the holiday, but as we mentioned before, it's better than pretending it's anything other than Christmas.
Today is “Boxing Day” in Canada, the UK, and other nations of the present and former British Empire. Traditionally, Christmas Day was when the master of the house would give presents to his family. On the following day, he would arrange for leftovers from his great feast to be given to his domestic staff, in boxes that they could take home. Eventually, it became customary to box other gifts as well.
Whatever works.
Meanwhile, the Irish celebrate this as a national holiday, too, only as Saint Stephen's Day, honoring one of the seven deacons appointed in the Book of Acts, to assist the apostles in their ministry. He was stoned to death by the Jews -- no, not all of the Jews, just some of them, and all of those guys were Jews, alright already??? -- and so is known in the Churches of the East as the "Protomartyr," as he was the first recorded to die for the Faith. And let's not forget that "Good King Welceslas" of Bohemia went out on the feast of Stephen, when the snow lay on ground, yada yada yada ...
It is also when Irish children would go from house to house, begging pennies to bury the wren, a tiny little bird whose size and scale for burial is exaggerated for the occasion, as demonstrated in the above video of "The Cutty Wren" by Nowell Sing We Clear.
I love to show this video of the á capella group Straight No Chaser singing their own unique version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas."
Today still feels a little like Christmas, only more stores are open, bustling continued consumer spending in spite of everything. I know, some people may think that's a concession to the over-commercialization of the holiday, but as we mentioned before, it's better than pretending it's anything other than Christmas.
Today is “Boxing Day” in Canada, the UK, and other nations of the present and former British Empire. Traditionally, Christmas Day was when the master of the house would give presents to his family. On the following day, he would arrange for leftovers from his great feast to be given to his domestic staff, in boxes that they could take home. Eventually, it became customary to box other gifts as well.
For this year's musical Boxing Day selection, we feature a tune by Courtney Barnett entitled (what else?) Boxing Day Blues (Revisited).
Whatever works, huh, guys?
Meanwhile, the Irish celebrate this as a national holiday, too, only as Saint Stephen's Day, honoring one of the seven deacons appointed in the Book of Acts, to assist the apostles in their ministry. He was stoned to death by the Jews -- no, not all of the Jews, just some of them, and all of those guys were Jews, alright already??? -- and so is known in the Churches of the East as the "Protomartyr," as he was the first recorded to die for the Faith. And let's not forget that "Good King Welceslas" of Bohemia went out on the feast of Stephen, when the snow lay on ground, yada yada yada ...
IMAGE: A signpost honoring US Highway 61, a north-south route in the Midwest that generally follows the Mississippi River, and is thus a perennial theme in the American blues tradition.
Yesterday I turned sixty-one years old. It was a day I share with actor Denzel Washington, professional wrestler Lanny Poffo, and magazine editor and morning news anchor Gayle King. Granted, it was not the banner year that was the previous birthday, and “Sal” was overseas on a family matter (more on that later). On the other hand, I received a record number of over one hundred birthday greetings on Facebook, more than twice as many as the previous year, including a record number of ex-girlfriends. I also got to see the new Star Wars movie (not too shabby, in spite of what they say), and I had the best steak dinner ever at my usual just-down-the-street Irish pub.
Aside from all that, it was just another day.
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They will probably come more quickly now, and an awareness of the inevitable is setting in. I remember things that I think only happened last year, but upon closer examination, happened two or three years ago. I meet former altar servers whom I supervised at my parish, who are now married and having children. And more often than not, when I walk into a room at the agency where I work, I am the oldest person there.
IMAGE: The Nine Ages of Man by Jörg Breu the Younger (circa 1510-47).
Most men at this point realize that there are things on the "bucket list" they made up at twenty-five, that they realize they are never going to get to do. I don't believe I suffer from that as much as others. I'll probably play guitar more often than I have in the last ten years, but the chances of being in a working band do get smaller. But never say never.
I am often told that I don't look as old as I am, maybe five or even ten years younger (especially by women, which is even better). True, I don't have wrinkles, and I still only have one chin. Maybe that's the ticket. Or maybe it's because the men in my lineage tend to live a long time, well into their eighties, even after a life of smoking like a chimney and drinking like a fish (not that I'm about to mention any names). My brother has the same good fortune, further evidence of it running in the family. Even my father spent half his life stricken with multiple sclerosis, and he lived to be eighty-six-and-a-half.
VIDEO: Pete Singer performs "Get Up And Go," a tribute to growing older, in a 1967 broadcast on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” (CBS).
But others are not so fortunate. I tend to look more at the obituaries than before, to see if there's anyone I know, or just how close in age I am to those who have passed on. Just a couple of months ago I read of a woman who died, who had worked at my agency for years. She hadn't been retired for one year when she was found to have cancer, and died soon after. She was only a couple of years older than myself. Could that just as easily happen to me, the odds notwithstanding? Now, if I were diagnosed with, say, pancreatic cancer, I'd be in a lot of pain, but I know I'd have a timetable, about six to eight months.
But I'm not waiting for that. For the following year of Our Lord 2016, I will begin the process of putting my affairs in order; the composition of a Last Will and Testament, detailed instructions on my funeral and burial arrangements, and what to do with my library of books, divided by subject matter, and where they will go. The hard part is with my musical instrument collection, which includes a banjo that's one hundred years old and belonged to my great-uncle, Otto. Who in what little there is of my line wants an old banjo?
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IMAGE: A daughter pays final respects to her mother.
Sal learned the news earlier this month. Her mother passed away during the early morning hours, falling asleep and leaving this world peacefully at the age of ninety-one. She and her brothers were soon on a plane to the Philippines. “Nanay” (pronounced NAH-nye, roughly translated as "Mommy" or "Mama") grew up in the province of Bataan (which is not pronounced buh-TAN, but bah-tah-AHN) located west of Manila along the Manila Bay. During the Japanese occupation in the 1940s, she spent much of the time in hiding, to avoid being captured by the Japanese, who used the native girls as "comfort women." After the war, she married a man from Pampanga (a province north of Manila), and they made their home in Navotas City (within Metro Manila, northwest of the capital city itself), raising five daughters, one of them adopted, and four sons. Together the couple operated a grocery store in neighboring Malabon City. After her husband had passed, she lived alone in a house in Malabon, not far from Sal and her own family, accompanied by a live-in caregiver.
IMAGE: A butterfly, said in Chinese and Pinoy folklore to represent the spirit of the deceased, pays a visit while her granddaughter is baking cookies.
The Funeral Mass was held on the evening of the vigil itself, and burial was the next morning. Nanay was laid to rest as a Bride going forth to meet her Bridegroom, in the gown from her golden wedding anniversary, a traditional Filipino formal dress known as a “terno” (from the Spanish for "matching"), characterized by pointed "butterfly sleeves" at the shoulders. Indeed, butterflies appear to be a characteristic in Filipino folklore. As the family was sitting down to the traditional dinner for the ninth day after their mother's passing, they were visited in the house by a swarm of butterflies. The Chinese say -- Sal is one-fourth Chinese, and most Filipinos are at least partially so -- that the winged creatures represent the deceased loved ones who return to comfort those left behind, and to celebrate the welcome of their new sojourner.
IMAGE: Sal greets a band of carolers in front of her house on the eve of Christmas.
There have been the usual matters of the disposition of the mother's affairs. We talk about every other day by videophone, usually briefly. She is never left alone long enough when she's home, always inundated with a steady stream of visitors, family members taking her one place or another. One thing is for sure, and the family has been warned; next time she goes, I'm going with her. Maybe it's just me, but I think three Christmases away in a row, whatever the reason, is about enough. They only have two seasons, a wet one and a dry one. At least I'll get to pack light.
With any luck, I'll get to see Christmas on the other side of the planet. Maybe I'll get to see a parade of parols, as well as a unique brand of carolers, up close and personal.
Fifty years ago tonight, the Beatles did their first televised performance in America, on The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS. They had already been together for several years, and had already released at least two albums the previous year, one in the United States. They had even made their first hit single, Please Please Me. But 1964 was the year that really put them on the map, and into the mainstream of American pop culture.
People can go on at great length as to the influence of "the four lads from Liverpool" on popular music. While they certainly did not invent rock and roll, they are responsible to a large extent for the genre as we know it today. To understand that, and to know why one major label actually rejected their audition two years earlier, is to understand the state of that genre for five years prior to that time.
There is, of course, the conventional wisdom; that the tragic death of Texas rocker Buddy Holly, just five years earlier almost to the day of the Beatles' USA debut -- it was memorialized in 1971 by Don McLean's "American Pie" as "the day the music died" -- signaled an end of innocence for popular music, if only for the white audiences. The raucous rockabilly beat that came out of the white musicians of Memphis, gave way to a smoother, more polished sound of Pat Boone and Frankie Avalon, while the Motown sound, with James Brown leading the way, went in its own direction.
Be that as it may, by 1962, it was apparent to the music industry, that "guitar bands" were already a thing of the past. Small wonder, then, that Decca Records dismissed the Beatles' audition demo that year. This wasn't the direction the music was going, and these boys, however hard-working, however optimistic, simply didn't fit the narrative. Few would have guessed that Capitol Records would have made the right choice in picking them up only two years later for American distribution.
While the Beatles did not introduce white kids to black music, they went a long way towards making more respectable for mainstream distribution. It was no longer just "Negro music," the sound of a particular demographic, but "rock and roll" that was for all with ears to hear. The would-be rockers in port cities like Liverpool scooped up the 45rpm singles by black artists like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, brought to their shores by British seamen returning from America, and boys like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, already teamed up with a skiffle band known as The Quarrymen (skiffle being a jazzed up form of jug band or folk rock made popular by artists like Lonnie Donegan), listened to every line, and copied every riff they heard.
The "fab four" were not the first to bring together the Negro sounds of rhythm and blues out of Detroit and Chicago, with the white sounds of rockabilly out of Memphis and Nashville. But under the influence of manager Brian Epstein, and the artistic genius of veteran producer George Martin, the band lent a degree of light and shade heretofore unknown to the emergent genré, as if unconsciously inculcating centuries of European culture. Critics would still dismiss them as a passing fad, but a few musicologists noticed a certain sophistication to their arrangements, both instrumental and vocal. Even classical music scholars such as Peter Schickele have found melodic similarities between early Lennon-McCartney compositions and various classical works.
The Beatles were not the mere fabrication of promoters, picked off the street with good looks and no talent; they were, at least in their essential form, a collective creature of their own making. There were no backup singers, no anonymous horn sections, no army of songwriters manufacturing creations for the uncreative (the occasional covers of R&B standards notwithstanding). What you saw was the whole package, on the packagers' own terms. No compromising with commercialism, but the other way around. Even trading in the slicked-back hair and the leather jackets, for the "pudding basin" haircuts and the matching suits and cravats, was their own brainchild, or at least that of Epstein, who followed a hunch for a trendsetter, by which they made their own mark on haute couture, and the culture at large.
As time went on, four young men who became overnight sensations in their early- and mid-twenties would come to terms with their sudden wealth, and their coming of age. With that would be the pull in different directions. There has been much speculation over the years, and more will be written anew, as to whether they would have lasted past the end of the decade, were it not for John Lennon's encounter with an older woman, an avant-garde conceptual artist from Japan by way of New York, by the name of Yoko Ono, who consumed John's life from their first meeting, and whose relationship has been said by some to be the catalyst of the band's demise. But the truth is, Yoko or no Yoko, all four of them were already on divergent paths. It would be some years after the tragic assassination of Lennon in December of 1980, that the remaining three would appear together in a television documentary, remembering their lost comrade, and singing the melodies together that they once knew.
It was the closest to a "Beatles reunion" the world would ever know. The opening segment begins here, with the video clip immediately above (and part two of twelve gets even better) ...
"On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, two turtle doves ..."
Today is “Boxing Day” in Canada, the UK, and other nations of the present and former British Empire. Traditionally, Christmas Day was when the master of the house would give presents to his family. On the following day, he would arrange for leftovers from his great feast to be given to his domestic staff, in boxes that they could take home. Eventually, it became customary to box other gifts as well.
