Wyszdom

The technical quality of this picture isn’t great (it’s from my phone), but it’s a great picture.

We Three Kings/Carol Of The Bells

The song I chose for my first Christmas post was “Carol of the Bells.” The second post was about a film score incorporating the song. The song for this post is Kenny G’s “We Three Kings/Carol Of The Bells,” which, as you may have already guessed from the title, combines “We Three Kings” and “Carol of the Bells” into a single song.

In one of Letterman’s monologues he told the following story, which I’ll have to paraphrase since this was years ago and I’m doing it from memory:

So I was in the elevator, listening to Kenny G.

[Dave looks up at the ceiling, implying elevator music.]

I gave him a dollar. 

Big and tall

When your family room isn’t limited to a single story, you can’t help but try and take advantage of that extra height. My family has certainly utilized that extra space with our Christmas trees. While they’ve settled down to a more reasonable height in recent years (not exceeding 12 feet), in the past we had some real whoppers. Sometimes, we’d even visit multiple tree farms because they didn’t all have trees that were tall enough every year. We eventually found a consistently satisfactory place, and knew the drill well. We would drive past the parking lot, and take our SUV back to one of the farther fields where they kept the big trees. There, we often had the whole place to ourselves to find and cut a tree, and then load it on the roof of the truck. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t a bailer out there; we had learned that our trees were too big to fit through it anyway. Finding and loading the tree was one part of the process. The next step was getting it in the house.

In our previous house, there was a standard-sized door right next to where we placed the tree. We didn’t get to use that door. No, we had to take it in through the double doors in the front of the house. Remember, it was too big to be wrapped up, so the branches were fully extended. One year, the tree was so large that even after opening up the double doors and trying to make it back to the family room, we had to take it out and cut it from the bottom so it could make a turn that a car could probably handle. After the season was over, the tree was taken out in pieces.

The trees greatly exceeded the published limits of a standard Christmas tree stand, and my dad modified stand to meet our special needs. His creation is an all-metal tree stand which is bolted to a wide wooden platform. Our trees to this day are also secured to the wall via hooks and wire, which prevent the tree from falling into the room should it become unstable. We didn’t always do this.

Setting the Trap

In my previous Christmastime post, I noted that Carol of the Bells is one of my favorite songs. I think my love of the song was due in part to its appearance in “Setting the Trap,” from the Home Alone soundtrack by John Williams. The piece includes bits from multiple Christmas songs, but Carol of the Bells is the most noticeable and makes it awesome. I’m sure I also enjoyed it when it was played by the bell choir in the church we used to attend before we moved to the house that was built for Christmas.

Injuries

As you may have already deduced from the fact that we wired our house for it, my family takes Christmas decorations seriously. This dedication is so deep, that it has resulted in multiple decorating injuries. I’ve been mildly electrocuted a couple of times working with the electric candles (when I was young… it made my arm feel like jelly and was scary. I don’t think my parents even know about this), but my dad has been hit the hardest.

At the bottom of our driveway in the second house I lived in, we had an evergreen tree. I don’t know what kind it was, but it looked like a Christmas tree. One year, we started putting lights on it. The tree kept growing, but this was easily handled by simply adding more lights. After a while, it became so tall that getting the lights on the top of the tree became a challenge. It outgrew the stepladder (which if I recall correctly is nine or ten feet in height), which required my dad to find a more creative way of getting to the top. Let’s just say that his solution involved two ladders. I was standing there holding a wad of lights, helping to hold the slack as he was working on the upper part of the tree, when I saw the great fall. I can’t visualize it anymore in my memory, but I do remember it being one of those (fortunately rare) moments in life where I was ready to call 911. He suffered a sprained wrist and spent that Christmas with his arm in a sling.

A few years ago, while I was away at school, my dad, who is still not afraid of ladders, started hanging a wreath above the fireplace in our dining room. There’s a picture of it (from a less eventful year) at the top of this post, taken from the second floor. Minutes later, he was on the floor with a shattered heel. He spent that Christmas with a cast and crutches, but has since recovered and even skied on the foot.

2nd in a series of Christmasy things.

Today is December 1st, so it’s time to start preparing for Christmas. Starting today, I will publish one “Christmastime” post per day. I’m not sure how long I’ll keep this up, but it will probably conclude on the 20th (the day I go home), 24th, or 25th. Each Christmastime post will include a picture, a song, and a story. The items will be presented in no particular order, so the first or last song/picture/story isn’t necessarily my favorite.

Carol of the Bells

I have over 400 Christmas songs in my iTunes library. I’m not up to Santa’s 980, but I’m getting there. The song that I probably have the most versions of is “Carol of the Bells.” I don’t have a specific version to list here, but start with one backed by a well-known choir and/or orchestra and you should be in for a good time.

Wired for Christmas

Did you know that my family’s house in Pennsylvania was built with Christmas in mind? For as long as I can remember, we’ve been putting electric candles in our windows each Christmas. For many years, this meant that for the month of December, at the beginning of each night we would have to go to each window and turn the candles on, and then turn them off again before going to sleep. The setup also involved several extension cords and outlet expanders to supply the necessary electricity in the right locations. When my parents were planning on building a new house, they asked for a pretty smart feature: an electrical outlet underneath each window, with all of the outlets on a single electrical circuit.

Now, when it’s time to set up the candles, fewer extension cords and expanders are involved (there are still some due to us putting multiple candles in large windows), and they are all turned on and off by a timer or single manual switch.

This is 1st in a series of Christmasy things.