Homing in on Christmas

Well, the day didn't begin well.  I won't go into the details, but elder daughter and I still weren't speaking when we arrived at younger daughter's school for the annual holiday concert.  We sat in awkward formations and made awkward conversations with the other families - I can never remember who is whom.  Then we trooped downstairs and sat in the old uncomfortable chairs and younger daughter began the concert with a song I didn't really recognize, a bluesy number with vocal embellishments.  She clutched a picture that she had worked on carefully the night before, singing to it with a strong and full voice.



Afterwards, I asked her about the song.  It's "Please Come Home for Christmas", by Charles Brown, yeah, " she said.  "I heard it in Home Alone."  We checked the newspaper and noted that Home Alone was on this evening.  (It's on most evenings, these days.)

We watched it, and I remembered what a silly movie it is, but younger daughter loved it.  And elder daughter and I were on speaking terms again.  The Resident Fan Boy and I located plum pudding and mandarin oranges, both of which have been difficult to find in Hades this year, so the day ended well.  We might make it to Christmas after all.

Xmas Eve

I've never cared much for writing Christmas as "Xmas", but you may have gathered that I've been loosely doing a sort of alphabetical theme this month. This is because by the end of November I had only posted seventy-four posts and I'm just obsessive enough to want to have written at least one hundred posts per year. Faced with twenty-six posts wanting, I thought: What the a-b-c...

Christmas Eve here in Hades has been a mixture of busy and quiet. Younger daughter, who has been ill this past week, made it clear that she wanted to go out, a sure sign she's getting better. (Naturally, I feel a sore throat coming on.) So out we went to see Arthur Christmas which was pretty charming, actually. Hard to go wrong with a film made by the Wallace and Gromit team, voiced by the likes of Jim Broadbent, Bill Nighy, Hugh Laurie and Imelda Staunton among many others.

When we emerged from the multiplex, the western horizon was an amber glow, and younger daughter impatient to get home: "C'mon! It's dark!" We grabbed a half-filled bus and hurried through the Rideau Centre which seemed to be full of women in hajib, all shops but the snack bars and the drug store shuttered up.

Christmas is tomorrow. Our gifts are wrapped; the tourtière is in the freezer. The best thing for now is a song in a John Rutter setting, the anti-Semitic lyrics of the original mercifully expunged, leaving a lilting, lovely choir piece. These young ladies are in the Oxford High School Caritas, in Oxford, Michigan.


May you dance, too.

Things that could be improved with cats

I was watching It's a Wonderful Life tonight. It's not my favourite Christmas movie (that would be Scrooge with Alistair Sim), but it's full of wonderful moments. I particularly love the bit when the angel in charge of Clarence (Angel Second Class) tries to explain his shortcomings to his superior: "Sir, he has the IQ of a rabbit!"

If it were my favourite movie, I'd invest in a DVD. As it is, it takes three hours to show the darn movie on television because there are fifty minutes of commercials. That got me to thinking of this, which showed up on YouTube recently:



"People don't want to watch ads; they want to watch cat videos." Damn right. Come to think of it, that's what It's a Wonderful Life is missing --- cats...