I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: AMY GRANT-Tiny Desk Concert #813 (December 17, 2018).

Amy Grant is “The queen Christian pop” and as such I have no use for her.

Amusingly this Christmas-themed Tiny Desk Concert was organized by Lars Gotrich who also loved death metal.

Lars explains his connection to Amy:

Growing up in the ’90s, there was never a Christmas without Amy Grant’s music. Home for Christmas, in particular, was a favorite around our household, its string-swept nostalgia wrapped around the family den like a warm blanket and a plate of cookies. So when I invited the Nashville pop singer to perform our annual holiday Tiny Desk, I had to bring my mom.

When I saw she was playing I feared the worst–bland inoffensive pop and offensive Christian music.  But rather, this Concert proves to be bittersweet with two songs about Christmas that welcome Christmas but also know that it’s not always perfect.

“As I’ve gotten older, sometimes I’ve realized the bravest thing you can do at Christmas is go home,” she tells the Tiny Desk audience after performing “To Be Together,” from 2016’s cozy, yet lived-in Tennessee Christmas. “Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is open the door and welcome everybody back.”

Her band sounds tight–piano and acoustic guitar and a cool five string bass.  Her backing singers do a nice job–and while it hovers along the line of too much for me, she reins it in nicely.  And “To Be Together” is really a lovely Christmas song.

And that’s when it all comes home for Amy Grant. “Tennessee Christmas,” written 35 years ago, takes on new meaning here — this was the first time she’s performed the song since her father died this year. You see her eyes glisten, and her voice catch on the final “tender Tennessee Christmas,” everyone feeling that wistful tenderness and offering some back in return.

If you don’t need therapy before Christmas…hang on you’re gonna need it after,

To shake out her sadness, Grant dons reindeer antlers (generously provided by someone at NPR because of course someone at NPR keeps festive wear on hand) and dashes through a delightful version of “Jingle Bells.”

This version of “Jingle Bells” is almost manic in its speed and juxtapositions of slow and fast.  It’s really great.

[READ: December 20, 2018] “Christmas Triptych”

Once again, I have ordered The Short Story Advent Calendar.  This is my third time reading the Calendar (thanks S.).  I never knew about the first one until it was long out of print (sigh).  Here’s what they say this year

Fourth time’s the charm.

After a restful spring, rowdy summer, and pretty reasonable fall, we are officially back at it again with another deluxe box set of 24 individually bound short stories to get you into the yuletide spirit.

The fourth annual Short Story Advent Calendar might be our most ambitious yet, with a range of stories hailing from eight different countries and three different originating languages (don’t worry, we got the English versions). This year’s edition features a special diecut lid and textured case. We also set a new personal best for material that has never before appeared in print.

Want a copy?  Order one here.

Like last year I’m pairing each story with a holiday disc from our personal collection, although I do love to include a Tiny Desk Christmas Concert like this one.

This is an actual Christmas story (or three) by the Canadian master of comedy, Stephen Leacock.

“Christmas Rapture (Pre-War)”
This is the most light-hearted of the three and a jolly good take on Christmas.  The narrator is a bit of a curmudgeon and snarks about the postman and the furnace man (the previous man he worked for who would give him a goose for Christmas every year).  Then he bemoans all of the events he has to go to this year:

A policeman brought tickets for [a big police concert] to the door yesterday–such a big, fine-looking fellow–with a revolver.   I took two tickets.

There’s also the Garbage Men’s Gathering.  He says it’s a new thing this Christmas, “the first time the garbage men have got together.  Think of it–ever since the birth of Christ.”

But it’s the same night as the Archaeology lecture by Professor Dim.  And let’s not forget the sermon from Canon Bleet:

He preached an hour and a quarter last Christmas…  He just took the text, Come!” — just that one word, “Come”– or, no, wait a minute, it was “Up!”

Then he remembers the Christmas dinner he had last year with the Dudds.  They are against drink, which means you can certainly eat.  While waiting for the turkey he ate a bunch of celery and “parsley and part of a table wreath by mistake.”

He finishes by talking about the presents he has for others–which he had to try out–they looked too new.

Hoodoo McFiggin’s Christmas
“This Santa Clause business is played out.” (Did people say that in 1910?).

For a parent to get up under cover of the darkness of night and palm off a ten-cent necktie on a boy who had been expecting a ten-dollar watch, and then say that an angel sent it to him, is low, undeniably low.

This follows Hoodoo McFiggin, a good religious boy, as he wakes on Christmas day.  Hoodoo spent all his savings buying his father a box of cigars and his mother a seventy-five cent diamond brooch.  Then he waited to see what Santa put in his stocking.  (He had prayed for about $150 worth of stuff).

The stocking was full.  But the puppy he wanted was actually boots, the watch and chain he wanted was shirt collars and that item that looked just like the toy pistol, well, he can’t shoot much with a toothbrush.

The ending was very funny.

“Merry Christmas”
This piece is not funny at all.  It is quite poignant.  The narrator is sitting at a table when Father Time pays him a visit.  Father Time says he is wrong in thinking that Christmas was “all played out and done with.”

The writer says that “all of the romance, the joy, the beauty of it has gone, crushed and killed by the greed of commerce and the horrors of war” (this was in 1918).  He says that if you could bring back the olden days “with the old good cheer, the old stage coaches and the gabled inns and the warm red wine, the snapdragon and the Christmas-tree, and I’ll be believe again i Christmas, yes in Father Christmas himself.”

Father Time says that Father Christmas is just outside.  Should he be invited in?  Of course he should.

But Father Christmas looked terrible–draggled with the mud and rain, his suit was tattered, his muffler was frayed.  The bundle of toys was wet and worn and the boxes gaped underneath.  Even his cheery confidence was gone

Father Christmas asks, Is this floor mined?  He was blown up in No Man’s Land between the trenches at Christmas-time in 1915.  It broke his nerve.

After bemoaning the state of the world during WWI (not sure if this was written after it or during).  Father Christmas sits by a warm fire in a comfy chair and Father Time asks the writer if he will help.

With a sip of schnapps and a warm fire, Father Christmas feels a bit better.  He even fixes a broken toy in the writer’s house.

But despite the sense of goodness, there’s still a gut punch coming.

Father Christmas shows some books that are wet and torn:

“I have carried them these three years past.  Look! These were for little children in Belgium and in Serbia. Can I get them to them, think you?”
Time gently shook his head.
“Look, some of them were inscribed already!  This one, see you, was written, ‘With father’s love’  Why has it never come to him?  Is it rain or tears upon the page?

Upon hearing the howling wind, Father Christmas exclaimed “My children’s voices! I hear them everywhere–they come to me in every wind–my children torn and dying in the trenches–beaten into the ground–I hear them crying form the hospitals.”

Father Time says the way forward is to keep the children of today from the horror and hate that racks the world today.  Let Father Christmas knows that the children who died did not die in vain, that from their sacrifice shall come a nobler, better world for all to live in.

Damn.

Merry Christmas.