We Need a Little Christmas
“We Need a Little Christmas” performed by Johnny Mathis is today’s song pick. Johnny Mathis does a good job, and “We Need a Little Christmas” is the opening song in A Muppet Family Christmas, although Mathis doesn’t perform it.
Bayberry candle
On Christmas Eve at 6 PM, my family lights a bayberry candle and we let it burn down until it extinguishes itself.
10th in a series of Christmasy things.
I recently developed a new impression of a coworker. Mark has a very distinct way of starting a conversation. I’m not sure if I captured it that well in this video, since my original impression contains top-secret Google topics, but the gist is that he speaks almost as if he’s writing an essay in high school using the “funnel” method. He was most recently a teacher, so I guess that makes sense. He starts broad, and then narrows down to the point. It’s a very logical way to speak and easy to follow, but for some reason I’m making fun of it.
Today, just a day or two after I first debuted my impression to Nelson, Mark walked up to Nelson’s desk and unknowingly launched into a perfect impression of himself. I mean it was dead-on. A few words into it, Nelson and I simultaneously started laughing so hard that neither of us could talk. Nelson tried several times to compose himself as Mark attempted to proceed with the conversation, which of course only made it worse. I was at the point where tears were coming down my face, so I had to leave the cube for a few minutes and walked around with a goofy smile on my face.
After the conversation was over, I explained why we were laughing and performed my impression. After telling him that my impressions are limited to a select group of people (I think Nelson is the only other person on the list), he described it as being a member of the worst club you could possibly be in. I think he liked the impression.
By the way, I used YouTube’s “Quick Capture” feature to do this since Apple returned my repaired laptop without iLife (or even an operating system). Pretty cool that you can capture video in a regular web browser with Flash.
Deck the Halls
“Deck the Halls” by Mannheim Steamroller is today’s song pick. We heard it on the radio a few times one year, and I really liked it, but had no idea who it was by. I think my mom was finally able to catch one time the name of the artist. And if I’m remembering this correctly, I believe I was able to find it on Amazon and use the audio preview to confirm that it was the correct song. We soon had a copy of Mannheim’s Christmas album.
Caroling
As far as I can remember, we only had carolers come to our door once. It was our neighbor and her Girl Scout troop.
In high school, my Spanish teacher brought in his guitar before our winter break started and we spent a class period going around to the other classrooms singing holiday songs. I’m pretty sure I remember us singing “Feliz Navidad” and seeing my teacher really get into it. When we were singing to a chemistry class, one of the girls gave the teacher a paper flower or ribbon or something of that nature. This is because he had told us in an earlier class that growing up in Mexico, he participated in a tradition where guys would sing outside of a girl’s window and then the girl would give the guy a ribbon or something like that if she liked him. He never got one.
When I was in first grade, I had the only speaking part of a first grader in the Christmas play. I still remember my line:
“Gee, these decorations look really neat. Now all we need is a star.”
On my cue, a star lit up above the stage and we sang another song. Then Linus came out and explained what Christmas is all about.
9th in a series of Christmasy things.
Mugs, spoons, and marshmallows ready to serve hot chocolate on Christmas Eve.
Suite from the Polar Express
I like traditional movie soundtracks. I like movies about Christmas. The soundtrack to The Polar Express isn’t particularly memorable, but I really like the look of the movie (all of the exterior shots of the train are incredible), and the music fits it well.
Presents
Three bits on presents:
1. We’ve given my dad a lot of flashlights.
2. One year, I thought it would be fun to add a bit of surprise beyond just covering a present in wrapping paper. I took my sister Julie’s present, which I think was an *NSYNC CD, and taped it to the inside of a modem box, and then wrapped that. When she opened her present, her face lit up with a beautifully forced smile.
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s a modem!” I explained. “28.8. It’s faster.”
“Oh, thanks.”
I then had to ask her to open up the box, and she found her true gift. She admitted that she thought I bought the gift because I wanted it for myself.
You may not know this about me, but I like to reuse jokes. It’s easier than coming up with new ones. So, the next year, I planted her present in a box from one of my model rockets.
She unwrapped the box, and was carefully suspicious. Drawing on her experience from the previous Christmas, she opened the box to check out the “rocket.” Inside, of course, she found rocket parts.
I encouraged her to dig deeper, and amongst the parts was her real gift. I don’t remember what it was.
3. When I was in kindergarten or first grade, there was an event at my school where kids could buy their parents (and apparently grandparents) gifts. A useful idea since most children that age can’t drive to a store, and once there, probably don’t have any money. I got my grandfather an ice scraper for his car. At the time, he lived in on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. My mom politely explained that perhaps I should swap the gift with what I got for my other (Pennsylvania-based) grandfather, a handkerchief. She told me that coming up to Pennsylvania from South Carolina usually gave my grandfather a cold, so the present would work out.
Laugh if you want; if there was an ice storm he would have been one of the few people who were actually prepared. I could have made him a hero.
8th in a series of Christmasy things.
If you’ve ever had Mike repeat what you just said using slightly different words that completely change the meaning, you will not be surprised that his mind works this way:
Mike: so far the docs have been helping a lot this year
hooray Google!
Me: cloud computing!
Mike: sometimes when i hear someone say that very fast, i hear clown computing
and i get really excited, and a little scared
Wonderful Christmastime
“Wonderful Christmastime” by Paul McCartney is today’s song pick.
The visitor
Last Christmas, I gave you my heart we had an unexpected visitor at our front door. On Christmas morning, we found a guinea fowl looking in the window. And we think it really liked watching us, pacing back and forth, looking in to our warm home. Even as we went right up to the window, the visitor wasn’t scared and just stared back at us. We went on with our morning, letting our feathery neighbor from the nearby farm just hang out. At one point my sister Julie went into the other room to play some Guitar Hero on the computer. She was startled to find the bird had followed her and flown up to the window ledge in the room next to the front door and was looking in intently as ever. I think she was a little freaked out (she has issues with birds, but that’s another story), but I thought it was funny.
7th in a series of Christmasy things.
Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town
I don’t usually like live recordings, but the famous recording of Bruce Springsteen singing “Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town” is one of my favorite Christmas songs. I think it’s my sister Sara’s favorite song period.
Christmas in New York
When I was very young, my family went up to New York City to see the Radio City Christmas Spectacular (perhaps more commonly known as “The Christmas Show”) at Radio City Music Hall. I can only remember a few bits from the show. I remember seeing the Rockettes and the cannon. I remember there was a small ice-skating rink that rose to the front of the stage, and I believe the orchestra pit moved up and down as well. There was a large wreath hanging above the center of the stage, with Christmas green leading up to it, all covered in white lights that turned on in sequence. And at the end, Santa came and took a couple of children from the audience to fly away in his sleigh. For years, it was the biggest live production I had ever seen.
This year, my family will return to the show. I’m looking forward to seeing New York again at Christmas, especially Rockefeller Center and of course the show. I’m sure that the show is great, but I hope that it’s still as impressive as I remember, even as someone who is now older and has been to Vegas.
6th in a series of Christmasy things.
Yes, some of the flames are blue and green. We’re just that fancy.
Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24
The Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24” combines “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” with, you guessed it, “Carol of the Bells.” Did you think I had forgotten about that song? I first got into the song when I was a freshman in college, and I heard it playing across the hall in Brendan‘s room. I rushed over and asked him what it was, and have been playing it at Christmas ever since.
Fire department
In our previous house, there was a fun tradition where at the start of the holiday season, the neighborhood would suddenly be alerted to a fire truck driving down the street with lights and sirens activated. The kids would run out of their houses, to greet the truck because on the truck was Santa Claus, waving and distributing candy canes. The year before we moved, I’m pretty sure that I was at least a little disappointed that along with the ice cream truck, we would no longer have an annual holiday visit from a fire truck in our more rural location.
On a cold winter’s night, a fire in the fireplace really makes a home feel like a home. It’s so delightful.
I can build a pretty good fire. And when it comes to camping, it’s pretty much the only thing I’m capable of. The key is to build a low-density structure, so it doesn’t smother itself. I say this partly to brag, but also to explain that I don’t build smoky fires, and I know what a downdraft is. For the first few years in our new house, however, the fire department paid us a visit at Christmas in what we eventually accepted as a strange holiday tradition. What would happen was when we had Christmas dinner in the dining room, we would utilize the rarely used fireplace. I would carefully build a reasonably-sized stack of dry, seasoned logs with pleny of newspaper underneath. I’d then check for a downdraft using the rolled-up newspaper technique. Everything seemed to be good to go, but shortly after lighting, it would become obvious that the smoke was not being drawn up the chimney as it should. Smoke would then enter the room. It wasn’t bad (remember, I build clean-burning fires), but as you can imagine any bit of smoke inside the house is never good, and it was certainly enough to set off the smoke detectors. We’d run around and open up windows and wave rolled-up magazines at the smoke detectors, but we couldn’t prevent the inevitable. They would go off, and, being tied to our security system, start a chain of events that would result in the fire department coming to our door. It was embarrassing, because I had plenty of uneventful fireplace fires under my belt. It was later found that the flue was installed in a sub-optimal location. Since the chimney was fixed, we haven’t had any visits from the fire department. We even cooked hot dogs in the dining room fireplace last Christmas. I’m glad we were able to make a simple adjustment instead of abandoning the wood-burning concept altogether and going virtual. (Funny thing about that linked picture… our TV is next to the fireplace, so we had a real and virtual one going at the same time, right next to each other.)
Some may not see work done on the chimney as an improvement. Shortly after we had moved into the house, my uncle was complimenting the recessed lighting just after we had a smoke issue. “I love how you can just see the beam shining down,” he said. It was illuminating the smoke.
5th in a series of Christmasy things.
Alright, what is going on here? My MacBook Pro is not in a happy state. Starting last night, it has been doing a strange crash. Here’s what happens:
I can’t force quit or anything; I can only force a shutdown by holding the power button. Since the whole system becomes unresponsive, and there are those funny lines, I’m thinking it’s a kernel panic.
At first I thought this was no big deal, and somewhat of a mixed blessing. It was about time I did a clean install of the system, for instance I had completely killed Spotlight a few months ago and was looking forward to getting it back. However, I’m afraid this issue may be independent of the system software. I started up from an installation disk, and before I could even complete the first step, choosing a language, I saw the dreaded lines. This happens both when booting from the hard drive and from the CD, so that can’t be good.
Here’s a picture:
Any Apple geeks know what this is? I usually know what’s up when I take my computer to Apple, so I can confidently say that it’s a hardware issue and I won’t let them waste our time trying to run Disk Utility or reformatting my hard drive.
Fortunately, this thing should still be under AppleCare (always a good buy on a laptop or monitor), so I might even get a free upgrade out of this. But I don’t like being without my personal laptop, and as nice and knowledgeable as the Genius Bar people are, I really really hate the experience and guaranteed 20+ minute wait after my scheduled time.
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen
Ever since I heard their version of “Deck the Halls” on the radio, Mannheim Steamroller has been one of my favorite artists for Christmas music. I have listed their crazy-awesome rendition of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” when asked for my favorite song, Christmas or otherwise. I prefer listening to it just after the not-as-rocking (but still cool) version on their Christmas album, as both tracks together make it a more complete experience. On one 45 minute journey from my high school to my house, I drove the entire way with the volume turned up and this song on repeat.
I don’t think I can update this anymore, so it’s missing new stuff, but a while ago I created this iMix, which at one point was the #1 ranked iMix on the iTunes Music Store when someone searched for [Mannheim Steamroller].
Christmas cookies
One of the greatest parts of the season is baking and eating Christmas cookies. My family is really into this, and we like to make a variety of cookies. I’d be happy only eating a couple of types, but I really like knowing that the other options are there, and seeing them arranged on a plate. It’s like going to a bar— you would be fine if they just have the few ingredients necessary to make your regular drink, but seeing the different bottles lined up and available for the bartender’s use gives you a sense of comfort and satisfaction.
Although my cooking experience is limited, I have always liked to help out with the cookies. I believe I started out by putting sprinkles on spritzes and pretzel-shaped cookies that we used to make. From there, I graduated to more skillful tasks, such as rolling chocolate crinkles (I always want to spell it as “krinkles,” like “Kringle”), placing Reese’s peanut butter cups in the peanut butter temptations, or cranking out spritzes. In fact, for many years now, I’ve been the master of the spritzes. It takes just the right timing and rhythm, and I have it.
My favorite cookie is vanilla meringues with chocolate chips. My family has been known to hide them from me, and there have been friendly battles over the last cookie of the season, resulting in a crushed cookie. My grandmother used to make them when we visited in the summer, and one year I remember hearing my sister yell, “Don’t let Michael get into the meringues!” like I was the family dog.
My grandfather is known to have the sweetest tooth in the family, and when I was younger I remember hearing him be called the cookie monster. His thoughts on cookies? Here’s a quote: “I’ve never seen a cookie that I didn’t like.”
4th in a series of Christmasy things.