One Horse Open Sleigh

I'm not generally a fan of "Jingle Bells", but this version (going under the title "One Horse Open Sleigh", under which the song was originally published in 1850) I have always really loved. Sadly, it's hard to get hold of. It appeared on an album entitled A Victorian Christmas by the Robert DeCormier Singers and Ensemble back in 1984, and it is currently out of print. Some used copies are at times available on Amazon, but they can be pricey. (According to the above link, there are currently none below $20.)

However, it seems sad not to have such a good version available, so I've ventured to put it up on YouTube, hoping that this somehow constitutes fair use since there's no way to currently buy the album in a way that benefits the artists.



Enjoy. And a Merry Christmas to all our readers.

"...All occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons."

From a sermon of John Donne, Christmas Day 1624.

God made Sun and Moon to distinguish seasons, and day, and night, and we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their seasons: But God hath made no decree to distinguish the seasons of his mercies; In paradise, the fruits were ripe, the first minute, and in heaven it is alwaies Autumne, his mercies are ever in their maturity. We ask panem quotidianum, our daily bread, and God never sayes you should have come yesterday, he never sayes you must againe to morrow, but to day if you will hear heare his voice, to day he will heare you. If some King of the earth have so large an extent of Dominion, in North, and South, as that he hath Winter and Summer together in his Dominions, so large an extent East and West, as that he hath day and night together in his Dominions, much more hath God mercy and judgement together: He brought light out of darknesse, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the wayes of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, though have been benighted till now, wintred and frozen, clouded and eclypsed, damped and benummed, smothered and stupefied till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate all shadowes, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.

May God abundantly bless your Christmas season with his innumerable mercies.

The Christmas Music Post, Radio Version

The good, the bad, and the random from the girls' favorite easy listening station, which has been playing Christmas music since before Thanksgiving, I kid you not.

Here's what I like this year: Michael Buble singing Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You". I can't stand the original, maybe because Mariah sings it, and she can't leave the vocal acrobatics alone long enough for anyone to hear the sound of her voice. But Michael Buble transforms it into something I actually want to listen to, again and again.

 

 Carrie Underwood and her Christmas music seem to be all over the radio these days. It could be that she has a pretty voice, but pop-style belting seems an odd choice for some of the more classical carols.

 

Here, Carrie, let a master show you how to lilt a carol. Allison Krause sings the Wexford Carol, with Yo Yo Ma.



Josh Groban has a fine voice, and I appreciate listening to someone with good training, but I'm saddened that he's whoring out his talent by singing sugar-laced dreck like this "Believe" song. Yes, I know it's from the movie Polar Express, but I only heard it this year, and I barely restrained myself from shouting, "What the hell?" in front of my children.



It's too bad, because he seems like a genuinely funny guy, as evidenced by his send-ups of his own persona. Here he is, hosting an episode of a British music game show. (I honestly do not remember how much content is in this video, but it's late-night BBC, so be warned.)

And finally, for those of you who need to kick it like it's 1987, here's RUN-DMC with "Christmas in Hollis" (h/t to the Korrectiv Office Party playlist).

Mary, Did You Know?

 Perhaps I'm the wrong person to be weighing in on this, because I simply don't like the song very much, but I was pleased by Jake Tawney's line-by-line analysis of the pop worship anthem "Mary, Did You Know?" at Roma Locuta Est.

The Charge Mary, a faithful Jewish girl, was guilty of ignorance regarding the facts about the coming Messiah… her own Son, Jesus the Christ.

The Prosecution Your Honor, I call Mary to the stand.

Mary, did you know that your baby boy will one day walk on water?

Mary Yes, I did. The Old Testament foretold that “He alone stretches out the heavens and treads upon the crests of the sea.” (Job 9:8)

The Prosecution Did you know that your baby boy will save our sons and daughters?

Mary Yes, I did. The Lord told our prophets, “Say to those whose hearts are frightened: be strong, fear not! Here is your God, He comes with vindication; With divine recompense He comes to save you.” (Is 35:4)

The Prosecution Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new… that this child that you’ve delivered will soon deliver you?

Mary Yes I did. The angel Gabriel greeted me saying, “Hail, full of grace (kecharitomene – Lk 1:28),” so I knew I’d already been delivered, actually. I then told my cousin Elizabeth that, “My spirit rejoices in God, my savior.” (Lk 1:47)

It's a Protestant song, and so it's no surprise that it reflects an incomplete Marian understanding, but it does seem a bit twee to suggest that Mary might have been surprised by the divine origin of her son, considering the circumstances of His conception. ("How can this be, since I do not know man?")

(Darwin was recalling last night how in his Confirmation program, the teachers were very fond of the "They Didn't Know!" school of theological speculation. "What would Jesus think if he could have seen 2000 years into the future? He didn't know there would be this huge church!"

"Well, yes he did," the teenaged Darwin replied. "I mean, he is God."

There was silence. "Yes, but did he really know?" insisted the teacher.)

Melanie Bettinelli feels that Jake is taking things too seriously, though, and comes through with an interesting defense of the song.

The rhetorical questions don't really imply that Mary didn't know the answers. Sure, on a literal level they are directed to Mary; but I think the listener isn't so much meant to linger on the state of Mary's knowledge so much as be drawn toward contemplation of the mystery of Incarnation. It reminds me of the list of rhetorical questions in Pink Floyd's "Mother". The "mother" character isn't really the point of the song, we're not meant to think about who the mother is or what she will think or how she will answer; she's just a rhetorical device. 
The song moves the listener away from the iconic scene of the Mother and child in the stable and toward the rest of the Gospel story. In a post-Christian culture where most people never move beyond the Christmas card picture to think about Who that little baby is, this song tries to get them to do that. 
I don't think the song needs rebuttal because it isn't really making the claims you say it's making about Mary. The one detail that I agree is off is the line about "the child you've delivered would soon deliver you" and yet I can forgive the bad theology. First, because it's a pop song and not a hymn. Second, because the focus of the line is a play on the word "deliver" not on the "soon". And last but not least, Christ's sacrifice on the cross did happen in time, a specific moment that fell after the moment of Mary's conception, obviously. The grace of that act saved Mary outside of time. I think it is well within the bounds of poetic license to juxtapose the moments and is a bit tendentious to impose rigorous theological language and categories upon a song.

I don't think there can be any conflict, however, that this is not an appropriate song to play at Mass (and yes, I've heard it there), because it is not at all "tendentious to impose rigorous theological language" upon the words sung during the liturgy, especially when they conflict with a Catholic understanding of basic doctrines of the faith.

A Bad Witness to the True Meaning of Christmas

It was December 21st and MrsDarwin and I were standing in the local branch of our bank, getting a cashier's check for more money than I like to think about so that we could go close on our new house. These things take time, as people don't normally come in and asked to cut large chashier's checks, and as we were standing there I gradually became aware of an increasingly loud conserversation between an elderly male customer and a teller at the other end of the counter.

"I'm very offended," he announced. "Very, very offended. And do you know why I'm offended?"

"Why sir?"

"Because I am a Christian and when I look around here four days before Christmas I don't see a single Christmas decoration. Do you know how long I've been a customer here? I want to talk to your manager."

At this juncture I ceased half-paying-attention and began full on spectating, since in the customer service hierarchy dealing with a shouting customer ranks higher on a manager's list of priorities than signing off on the large cashier's check of a quiet couple holding a sleeping baby, and thus we wouldn't be going anywhere until this fellow was dealt with.

The manager attempted to smooth things over, pointing to a few red bows and fake evergreen that decorated the branch, but the man would not be pacified.

"Those aren't Christmas decorations," he declared. "Christmas is a religious holiday. It's about Jesus. And I don't see a thing in here to show that it's happening this week."

Further attempts of the manager to placate got nowhere, as the fellow demanded, "Look up my account. Look how long my wife and I have been banking here and how much money we have with you. If you don't care about Christmas I'm closing out my account and taking my money elsewhere."

At last, the manager apparently decided that reasoning wasn't getting anywhere, so he took his soon-to-be former customer off to one of the side offices while one of the tellers brought out a bill counting machine in order to fulfill the customer's request that his money all be withdrawn, "In large bills." Our spectating ended, as the manager signed off on our cashier's check as he passed, and so we were able to leave shortly thereafter. As we passed the closed door of the glassed-in office, I could see the man still gesticulating and talking inside as the manager nodded in the pained way that those tasked with taking care of disgruntled customers do.

As we drove off, I couldn't help feeling depressed about the whole spectacle. Though a nominally Christian country, at least as the polling data goes, people who are in any way serious practicing Christians are increasingly a minority in our culture, and as such ripe for being understood primarily based on their loudest representatives. That one of these should be a man angry that the local branch of Chase didn't have religious Christmas decorations on display seemed, if anything, a way of making people more averse to Christianity rather than the contrary. Indeed, if I were to list the difficulties that Christianity faces at this time, the failure to be endorsed by J. P. Morgan Chase does not seem high on the list.

Though as the saying goes: You can pick your friends, but you can't pick your family. This goes as much for brothers in Christ as for blood relatives.

Hodie Christus Natus Est!

Merry Christmas to our loyal and patient readers! Christ was born in a stable, but the Darwin house resembles the inn, with family rattling merrily around the new homestead. The vast swathes of paneling give the place a fine acoustic, which my sister (the opera singer) has exploited to fine effect. Every day reveals new facets of the house, both amazing and discomfiting, such as: there used to be a house phone! The ceramic heater in the bathroom still works! Out of four showers in the house, only one is fully operational! The downstairs bathroom door neither catches nor latches -in fact, only one of the bathrooms locks! Fortunately, it's the one with the working shower.

The home Internet connection won't be functional until later this week, and the iPad, for all it's toy value, is recalcitrant when it comes to typing much more than a sentence or two. (Witness, or rather don't witness, because you can't, the paragraph of inimitable prose it just ate as I tried to fix a minor typo.) We shall be back in form soon, and with photos to boot. What the move takes away, it restores: the memory chip to the digital camera, lost in the move from Texas, was discovered again in the midst of packing for Columbus.

We're about to settle in the library to watch A Christmas Carol (the George C. Scott version; Darwin will countenance no other). God bless us, every one!

The Christmas Bookshelf

Christmas, like every other time of the year, was marked by books. Various books made up favorite Christmastime reading, and flat, rectangular packages were stacked neatly under the Christmas tree. Indeed, if there was a year in which more than half the family presents exchanged were not books, I cannot recall it.

And so, of course, this time of year reminds me of all sorts of favorite books. Here are a few of those rooted most deeply in this season for me.

The feast of St. Nicholas, with the putting out of our shoes in hopes of chocolate coins, always seemed to start the Christmas season in earnest for us children, since as on Christmas we woke early in expectation of candy. And, of course, St. Nicholas is the distant ancestor of our bowdlerized Santa Claus. St. Nicholas himself is, of course, a far more interesting character. A real person (who among other things once popped bishop Arius a good one) St. Nicholas is also one of the saints around whom a robust mythology sprang up, and The Twenty Miracles of Saint Nicolas by Bernarda Bryson is a simply outstanding retelling of many of the most famous myths about him, from the three dowerless maidens and the three boys in the salting tub to my personal favorite "How Saint Nichold Met and Overcame the Goddess Diana".

The next feast day in December which normally hit our radar was Our Lady of Guadalupe, and for me the Tomie dePaola The Lady of Guadalupe will always be the definitive version. Indeed, when I read it to my own children, I find myself falling into the cadences of my mother's voice, which is the voice which in my mind's ear I will always here it in.

Some might see it as a "girl book", but I much enjoyed hearing and reading The Story of Holly and Ivy by Rumer Godden as a child, and I have since found a copy so that I can read it to my own passel of daughters. A story about wishes and dolls is something to stir any girl's heart, and one or two of mine are generally sniffing by the end, while the stories of a six-year-old orphan and an aging childless couple are enough to play on parental heart strings. And Rumer Godden writes this short story with the same skill as in her adult novels.

I can't say why this book stuck with me. I recall the day my father stumbled across it in a bookstore and was charmed enough to pick it up. As the oldest, I was no longer in the prime audience for a picture book, being 13 or so at the time. But A Christmas Card for Mr. McFizz by Obren Bokich, is quietly charming. A couple years ago, at this time of year, it bubbled up in my memory and would not go away again until I bought a copy to read to my children.

High Spirits is collection of short stories, based on the ghost stories which Robertson Davies would tell the faculty and students of Massey College each Christmas. They are humorous ghost stories, and in some cases of varying quality. But those which are good are very, very good. Look especially for "The Cat That Went to Trinity", "The Ghost That Vanished By Degrees" and "The Kiss of Khrushchev". While I hear The Lady of Guadalupe in my mother's voice, I can't read these stories aloud without falling into my father's voice.

And, of course, how could any list of Christmas reading be complete without A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I try to read it every year. And, of course, I also always re-watch the outstanding George C. Scott movie adaptation.

The Economics of Scrooge

Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is among my favorite stories. This year, I've been reading it aloud to the family for the first time. (I started off reading it to the girls, but MrsDarwin has proved a more apt audience. Dickens' prose remains a bit beyond 5 and 6-year-old tastes.)

I'm far from being alone in my affection for A Christmas Carol, and so there are any number of movie adaptations available as well. This particular year, it happens that I saw two versions, the George C. Scott adaptation which is an absolutely superb film, and also The Muppet Christmas Carol with Michael Caine.

A number of comparisons might spring to mind when watching two such different treatments a few days apart, but in this case what struck me immediately was the way in which each movie attempted to convey the heartlessness of Scrooge's business methods.

Dickens himself is rather sketchy about what exactly Scrooge's business is, other than that it consumes all his attention. Scrooge sits in a counting house through the day, and in the outer office Bob Cratchit is seen copying letters -- a clerical task generic enough it could pertain to any business. It's also mentioned that Scrooge makes short term loans or securities on the Exchange. Or at least, that is how I take the line:
This was a great relief, because ``three days after sight of this First of Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge or his order,'' and so forth, would have become a mere United States' security if there were no days to count by.

Doubtless merchant financing and options trading seemed far too complex for a children's movie, so in the Muppet Christmas Carol, Scrooge has been turned into a writer of mortgages -- or a landlord of rental properties, the scriptwriter can't quite seem to make up his mind. In the opening scene Scrooge gleefully tells Cratchit (Kermit the frog) and a small army of small clerks (the rats) to write up the next day's foreclosures to be delivered on Christmas. Gleefully rubbing his hands together, he declares that this is the best season of the year for mortgage lenders.

Later, however, when Marley's ghost (in the Muppet version transformed into the Marley Brothers, played by the hectoring old men from the Muppet Show) appears, they reminisce about the good old days when they evicted people from houses they couldn't afford the rent on. "Remember the year we evicted the whole orphanage? There they were, shivering in the street with their frosted teddy bears!"

Clearly, the point here is to portray Scrooge as being in the very worst possible sort of business, but what the screen writer seems to have been unclear on is that if you hold a mortgage as a lender the very worst thing that can happen to you is having to foreclose on it. If the homeowner had enough equity in the house to cover the balance owed, the homeowner would obviously sell the house, pay off the loan, and keep the balance. So foreclosures are only going to happen when the house is worth less than the balance on the loan. The lien holder sells the house to make back as much as possible of the lost money, but it'll invariably be a loss for him. If Scrooge is writing our reams and reams of foreclosures, he's probably about to go out of business. (After all, if foreclosures made lenders rich, our financial industry wouldn't be in such trouble now.)

Similarly, although a landlord stands to start making money again if he evicts renters who can't pay and replaces them with ones who can, he obviously loses rent in the mean time, and has to go through extra work getting rid of the old renters and finding new ones. A landlord would make much more money by finding good renters who can afford his rents in the first place.

So while the Muppet Christmas Carol seeks to make Scrooge out as the ultimate in greedy businessmen, they mostly only succeed in making him look deeply incompetent. How he could get rich by such means is totally unclear.

The George C. Scott adaption has a rather more historically and economically literate approach to Scrooge's business dealings. In an early scene, Scrooge goes down to the exchange where he meets with three men seeking to buy a warehouse full of grain which Scrooge owns. They ask him if he has reconsidered his price since the day before. Scrooge replies that he has: the price has gone up 5%. That's outrageous, they reply. No, says the imperturbable Scrooge, it's business. But if grain prices rise, the poor will suffer. That's their look out, says Scrooge. You'll end up with a warehouse stuffed with grain, they warn him. Surely, he replies, that's his own lookout. He then warns them that the price will increase another 5% if they wait until the next day -- on which threat he succeeds in closing the deal.

From what I've read about the mid 19th century British economy what Scrooge is probably doing here is using his considerable capital to buy up futures on the harvest for the year. Because it was a period of instability for many British farmers, it was often possible for a money lender to buy up the harvest in advance at vastly reduced prices. This relieved the farmer of the risk of a bad harvest, but lost him most of the benefit that would otherwise have come from a good year -- with the profits from a bountiful harvest instead going to lenders and traders like Scrooge. With sufficient dominance in such a market (and enough capital to be able to wait for scarcity to set in) Scrooge could also attempt to corner a market and wait for times of scarcity in order to sell his grain.

If one feels the need to imagine a business model that fits with Scrooge as presented in the story, this seems like a fairly reasonable way to go.

Gimme

This isn't our gift-giving model around here, but this has to be one of the best examples of viral marketing I've seen.

Okay, here's a pet peeve: what is it with women buying gifts for themselves "from" their husbands? If you buy it yourself, it isn't a present. Also: what is it with couples buying themselves a joint present? That's not a present, it's a joint purchase. A present is something given.

We're not all that big on presents. I got it into my head at a young age that it was greedy to show too much interest in presents, and so I'm pretty low-key about them (both receiving and giving). In fact, it's only over these past few years that I've realized that it's not in poor taste to open a gift in front of the person who gave it to you. (I don't know where this particular hang-up came from.) It's only since I had children to watch opening presents that I've come to understand that presents aren't just about materialism.

My Youth as a Santa Skeptic

When the Darwin children tore the wrapping off their Christmas presents last week, they bore tags like "From Mom and Dad" and "From Grandma" but not "From Santa". Santa has never made an appearance in Darwin family mythology, primarily because I was one of those aggressively skeptical children who refused to suspend disbelief in Santa starting around the age of 3 or 4.

I pestered by parents with questions: How does Santa get into houses without chimneys? How does Santa really know if people are good or not? How does Santa visit all houses in one night? Why does Santa seem to give the same sorts or presents that Mom and Dad would?

My parents didn't want to set a precedent of lying to their children, so I quickly sensed that the answers they gave me were highly qualified. "Maybe if Santa can't reach all the houses, he lets parents know what he would give and so the parents deliver the presents for him."

I smelled a rat and zeroed in for the kill: "There isn't really a Santa, is there? It's just a story that parents tell children."

Why go to all the work to spin stories for a child who insists on cold reality? Santa died: not with a bang, but with a whimper. Feeling in my youthful heart that I had now overturned one of the great frauds in history, I worked to spread the word. Other children, however, seemed less interested. Other adults were also not necessarily as free thinking as my parents when it came to unmasking the Santa game. In third grade I was ordered to the principle's office for blowing the whistle on our teacher, who had skipped over a few pages in the book she was reading aloud after lunch -- in which the main character's older sibling informed him that Santa was just Mom and Dad. Our teacher must have thought we still needed to be spared this harsh reality, and the rest of the class wasn't bothering to read along and didn't notice the skipped pages.

"Now why did you do that?" the principle, our one remaining nun -- and not a very severe one -- asked. "You teacher says one of the girls in your class was crying."

"It's true," I responded, dogmatically.

Sister sighed and told me to sit in the chair outside her office for half an hour and then go back to my classroom.

Now, in our family, there were three gift holidays in the lineup. On St. Nicholas Day cookies and chocolate coins and such showed up in our shoes, placed there by St. Nicholas. On Christmas there were presents and stockings, and on Epiphany there were one or two small presents in celebration of the Three Wise Men.

I'd quickly driven Santa from Christmas, such that my younger siblings never even heard of him, except as a pop-myth which other families believed in. However, I was much more hesitant to question whether St. Nicholas really had anything to do with the little presents that showed up in our shoes. I think it's mostly that I was worried it would be disrespectful to publicly question a saint.

Eventually, at around age six, I performed an attempt at a double blind test which for the longest time suppressed my willingness to dig further in that regard. The Jewish kids in the next apartment over had, of course, never heard of St. Nicholas day. When I realized this, I started talking it up to them (get candy before Hanukkah!) and encouraged them to put out their shoes and see if candy appeared. I figured that if it really was St. Nicholas, then he would know the shoes were there in the next apartment over, and the candy would duly be delivered.

Sure enough, candy appeared, though theirs was marked with pictures of Menorahs and the Star of David. Years later, my mom recounted to me that the kids had talked it up so much to their parents that they had figured they'd better provide candy lest the kids be disappointed, so the Hanukkah candy was dipped into early. (Another experiment foiled by the inability to control for all factors.) However, it was several years more before I dared directly question whether the saint was directly involved in delivering St. Nicholas Day treats.