Fifty-six years ago today, the greatest James Bond movie ever made, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, premiered. I have written about OHMSS extensively here and also here (as part of my Definitive Ranking Of All The Bond Films), so I won't go into it in detail in this post...but it's the one Bond film that takes place specifically at Christmastime, and it actually has its very own Christmas song, written for the film by composer John Barry and lyricist Hal David. The song, "Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown", in heard briefly in the film when Bond is in a Swiss village trying to evade Blofeld's minions. Is it a great song? Should it be a Christmas standard? Maybe not...but for me it is.

Donald Trump delivered a fear-drenched rant live from the White House.

Longtime followers of this site may recall that as Christmas draws nearer--and as of this posting, we're less than ten days out--this feature shifts focus to be more and more reflective of my sentiment regarding Christmas. This is when old favorites that I love dearly start to appear in this space; this is when we reach the point of "It's not Christmas until I hear ." I didn't know, until fairly late in her life, that this was my mother's favorite Christmas tune. Once she told me, I made sure to feature it every year...and now I do so in tribute.

Continuing our tour of music inspired at least in part by water, we have a bit of film music by the master himself: the title track from John Williams's score to the 1984 film The River. The movie is about a family who struggles to maintain their farm and their lives beside a river in Tennessee. I've never actually seen the film, but the score is highly regarded. The main theme is optimistic Americana with a southern twang to it.

A harpsichord will have around 61 keys. Some more, some less. A piano famously has 88 keys...but not always. The Bosendorfer company makes pianos with up to 97 keys. A pipe organ can have as many as 200 keys...and adds in a full set of pitched foot pedals, and a set of controls called "stops" that control specifically where the air that makes all that sound goes. The amount of coordination needed to perform pretty much anything on a pipe organ amazes me. In all my classical music listening, I generally have never much devoted a lot of time to the various keyboard instruments.

YouTube video by ABC CINEMA

I would absolutely wear overalls to a Christmas party, were I to be invited to one...but I'd also likely not get invited to the kind of Christmas party where wearing overalls was a serious faux pas. Anyway, I always like this one.

(This is a repost from a number of years ago. I recently saw the movie Cousins for free on YouTube, so watched it over several breaks and lunches at work, as I hadn't seen it in quite a few years. It actually holds up pretty well, and when I looked up my earlier post, I realized that I honestly wouldn't change much of it at all, except to maybe accentuate more the point that the movie really is a fantasy of sorts, and if a situation like this movie's came to pass in real life the participants would all need extensive therapy.

My alma mater, Wartburg College, puts on a big music concert every year for Christmas. Called Christmas With Wartburg, it's a big production that involves several, if not all, of the school's largest music ensembles in a night of Christmas music (mostly sacred). This production was always a really big deal with a lot of work involved. When I was there, we did four performances: one at the college auditorium on Thursday night, usually the first or second Thursday after Thanksgiving, right before finals). Then a performance at a really big Lutheran church in Cedar Falls (a bigger town half an hour down the road) on Friday night, and then a performance on Saturday night at the Civic Center in Des Moines (which involved a three-hour drive).

By Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, I do not remember a time in my life when I was unaware of the existence of one Richard Wayne Van Dyke. The man has just always existed, you know? Likewise, I couldn't begin to tell you what the first thing is that I ever saw him in. It may well have been this:  But it also might have been this: The most recent thing I've seen him in is this: I can't say that I've been a huge fan of Dick Van Dyke, but neither have I ever been a detractor in any way, and maybe I haven't been a huge fan simply because I just haven't seen as much of him as I've seen of other people.

I've noticed that I listen to chamber music more in the colder months than I do during the warmer. I'm not sure why that is, but maybe being inside more results in me responding more to the intimacy of good chamber music. Arcangelo Corelli wrote a concerto grosso upon the commission by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, and he noted in the score that it was "made for the night of Christmas". The work has no specific date, as it was eventually published in a posthumous collection of Corelli's works. Nevertheless, if you've ever wondered what an Italian Cardinal might have been hearing musically on Christmas night in the late 17th or early 18th centuries, here you go! I like this piece a great deal.

I went to YouTube and searched under "The Night Before Christmas read by", and obviously my hope was to find a good, solid reading of the classic poem. But then I saw this.

I know I said the other day that I've always had difficulty with the music of Claude Debussy, but that doesn't apply to everything he wrote. There's a piano miniature of his that I have always loved, called "The Girl with the Flaxen Hair". Here it is, played by a cello quintet, because hey, why not.

Two weeks out! I hope your shopping is done. And if it isn't, well, you have time. Anyway, here's something just outstanding. I usually feature the full soundtrack album of A Charlie Brown Christmas at some point during this series, and this year is no different...but it's not the original. Apparently there's a jazz trio called The Commercialists, based in Milwaukee, who get together in December to go around performing...the entire soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas. This is just wonderful. Enjoy!

So, what is a "carol", anyway? In our time, the only "carols" we think about in the musical sense are Christmas carols, which seem to be a subset of "Christmas songs" in general: the carols are the traditional ones that we might have heard in Victorian England. We picture small groups of people in tall hats and heavy clothing standing outside gaslit buildings and singing old Christmas tunes: "Good King Wenceslas", "Silent Night", and so on. We wouldn't envision carolers singing, say, "All I Want For Christmas". But the fact that we have Christmas carols seems to offer two possibilities: carols are