Three more weeks

Two more weeks of actual classes, then a week of finals, remain in this semester.

There's a lot to get done between now and then (despite my final exams being essentially written: as I do not hand them back, I can reuse most or all of the previous semester's, with a few changes or updates in case there was something I covered differently or didn't get to).

But also, this is the time of year I kind of want to relax. I want to be able to spend time watching Christmas specials or cheesy holiday movies (it seems that the Hallmark channel has gone to 100% Christmas-themed movies, all the time. Or, I don't know, maybe they have a Hanukkah movie or two to add in there. You'd think they would.) And I would like to spend time knitting or quilting - I started up quilting again on the current quilt in the frame on Sunday afternoon and was pleased by how fast this one seems to go as compared to the previous quilt.

I've got my decorating mostly done (pulled out the Christmas-themed quilt and put it on my bed this weekend; I still have to put up a wreath and change the tablecloth for a Christmas one).

I like the idea of doing things differently this time of year. Of having special things to put up, and little lights, and different music.

 Some of the Sirius channels have shifted to holiday mode. Classical Pops has not gone there yet; as I remember, they didn't until the 1st of December or thereabouts. The "40s on 4" channel (and I hope they do keep that one, even as people who were contemporaneous with that music die off; there are those of us in younger generations who like it) is now a "40s through the 60s" Christmas music channel - though of what I've heard when I had it on, it seemed to slant more 60s than 40s. And I have to admit, I like the older Christmas music. Again, I think this is a feature of my odd family demographics: my parents are of the pre-Boomer generation (The "Silent Generation," I think they're called?). I COULD have been a Boomer myself, if my parents had gotten busy having kids right after they married. (As it was, they were married very nearly 10 years before I made the scene. I am not sure why - and I am not prone to prying - but a few things my mother has said over the years makes me wonder if maybe my brother and I were much longed-for and hoped-for babies, rather than babies that came almost unexpectedly....)

But anyway. My parents' parents were of the generation that would have listened to Rudy Vallee and the likes when they were in their 20s, and my parents seem to have grown up listening to Bing Crosby and the like....and so most of the pop records we had when I was a kid (and we didn't have many; my parents' taste in music runs more to Beethoven and Brahms) were from that era. Including the Christmas records. So I associate "White Christmas" MUCH more with Bing Crosby than I do with any of the more recent pop singers (though the Drifters - if I remember correctly, it was them - did a pretty nice doo-wop version of it). And I've mentioned before that I think some of the current versions of Christmas songs and carols - well, there's almost a tarted-up quality to them, where the singer's vocal acrobatics and the "sweetening" of the arrangement overtakes the meaning of the words, and I don't care for that. I prefer things simpler. (One exception: The Thorns' acoustic version of Silent Night, which I love very much. But then again: it's a very simple rendition and I feel like they respect the lyrics).

There are also a lot of novelty Christmas songs out there. I am not sure how I feel about them. I can laugh over "Santa Baby" because it is SO in opposition to what the holiday is really about (though I wonder if singers down through the year of the song have sung it with the irony intended). But some of the childish ones kind of set my teeth on edge, and "Zat you, Santa Claus?" seems fairly stinking of bad old stereotypes, even when someone like Brian Setzer does it.

(Then again, I can laugh over Dominick the Christmas Donkey. Well, not if I had to hear it multiple times, but once or twice and I will chuckle when it comes on. Same with that hippopotamus song. But please, not the one about the two front teeth....)

I do have some recordings (CDs; you can't really call them "records" though records are what I grew up with and are the first thing I think of when I think of recorded music) that I play over and over again: the music from Charlie Brown's Christmas, which is both nostalgic and sophisticated (it makes good background music when you have people over, too, because it's kind of stylistically of-a-piece and there aren't too many vocal tracks). A compilation of 40s and early 50s stuff called something like "A Sentimental Christmas," a recording by Gloria Dei Cantores of old, mostly sacred, Christmas music. And the John Denver and the Muppets album. (I can go back to being 8 or 9 again when I play that - we had the record and we played it a lot during Christmas). It's funny when I think about how some of the girls in my dorm - we had a little dorm library and it had some records - ridiculed it for being there. I didn't say anything, because I didn't want to seem uncool, but I was dying to defend the record as something lots of kids loved when it came out. Oh well, now lots of people in my peer group or slightly younger, when they hear of the album or hear a song from it, go "OH! John Denver and the Muppets! I LOVED that record!"

I suspect that as one gets a bit older, one learns to drop that false sophistication that one develops in one's late teens and twenties. Or maybe I just had a lot of music snobs in my dormitory, I don't know.

Then again: one of the things I love about Christmas is that you can, I think more than any other time in the year, drop some of the pretenses of sophistication and enjoy things again you enjoyed as a child. I know people who only ever eat candy at Christmas, for example. Or people who wear goofy Santa Claus pins or something similar. Or the people who decorate their yards and put up "Santa Stop Here" signs even though their children are all past the age of believing....

(And there ARE some interesting and different songs on there - there's a version of "A Baby Like You," which I think Sinatra also did in a slightly different version, and there's a slightly-altered and set-to-music version of Robert Bridges' Christmas Eve, 1913, which is my favorite Christmas poem ever. (They do leave out the England-specific part, and they change some of the phrases to make it scan more neatly for a song or rhyme better, but the spirit is still there).