Snow Angels

Hello World, And so here we find ourselves already at the last Sunday in Advent, believe that or not, which seems to have crept up on us awfully quickly - and that's because Christmas is on a Sunday this time, pushing the 4th Sunday in Advent back a week to the 18th, which is the earliest it can possibly be in any given year. Even after the final Sunday in Advent, there's still one more shopping Saturday, the 24th, for those procrastinators and bargain-hunters out there waiting until the eleventh hour, before the juggernaut that is Christmas pulls into the station on the 25th at last. Speaking of late, that's what I would call Hanukkah this year, which begins at sunset on Saturday the 24th, right next to the jolly old elf himself in the red suit, in a spirit of ecumenical harmony that is rarely the case. As a movable feast (and here we have Dr. Joel Hoffman at The Huffington Post to thank for this clarification) "Hanukkah is the 25th day of the Jewish month of Kislev. The Jewish month of Kislev can currently start as early as November 3 or as late as December 2, which means that the first day of Hanukkah can come as early as November 28 or as late as December 27." Thank you, kind doctor, and I'm sure we're all looking forward to latkes and hamantaschen, along with our egg nog and candy canes, and plenty of holly jolly Hava Nagilla to round things out, by dreidel. Of course, if it's already this late in the yuletide season, alert readers may be wondering, and well may they wonder indeed, whatever became of Lessons & Carols at church, that beloved holiday tradition that warms the very cockles of our hearts, and brings joy to the cheerful and cheerless alike, by Kringle? It was served up, piping hot and fully loaded, last Sunday afternoon, and was a rousing success by all accounts. Since the church doesn't have a Music Director any longer, the entire program has been scaled down and simplified so that we can pull it off by ourselves without professional help, or the need for protracted and complicated rehearsals. For myself, I usually start early in the fall every year, and set my sights on some unsuspecting target in the congregation, who I then proceed to browbeat into singing a duet with me for the event, whether they want to or not, and mostly they are agreeable enough to cooperate. This time, I approached the minister of the Anglican congregation that worships in our building after we leave, since I already knew that he had a very strong singing voice, and I hoped that he would be too polite to refuse. In my (perhaps delusional state of) mind, I imagined that he might say something like, "Oh, I'd love to, I've always wanted a chance to sing 'O Holy Night'." Or, "I'd be happy to help you out, why don't you pick a hymn that you think would be good?" But he wasn't in my mind, obviously, because the very last thing I expected to hear him say was, "Certainly, I'll write a new song for us to do." This threw a kind of a monkey wrench into my plans for the occasion, since it took several weeks to beat this into shape on an a capella basis, then two different people to transcribe it into actual sheet music (including our resident music maven, Bill, who has the strength of ten because his heart is pure) which left us just enough practice time to get it down before the actual service, thank heaven. In the end, everything went off without a hitch, was well received by the enthusiastic audience, and followed by a wonderful pot luck meal that gave new meaning to the idea of warming the cockles of our hearts, believe me. In a classic Hollywood touch, when we left church afterward, there was a picturesque dusting of snow all over everything, making the neighborhood look just like a perfect Currier & Ives Christmas card from days gone by, fa la la la la la la la la. In other local news of a seasonal nature, we went out to round up our Christmas tree last Saturday, at the VFW lot where we always go, and came home with a beauty. It's true that it's not quite as gargantuan as our usual choices [some of which did any and/or all of the following: 1) collapsed the roof rack on the car, B) broke the tree stand, and iii) literally had to be chopped apart in January just to get it out of the house] but it does have a beautiful shape, and that's not just a lot of O Tannenbaum, believe me. In fact, even a cursory stroll through the lot would reveal that all of the trees, in all sizes, seemed to feature the same nearly perfect form, and you could literally walk through the place blindfolded, throw a rock in any direction, and hit a tree with a great shape, without even trying. When we brought it home and stood it up, and it started to settle, it had an amazing symmetry on all sides that was remarkable to behold. And while it certainly was not so big that it would break the tree stand, our ancient battle-scarred stand (which, in fairness, has unfailingly supported enormous trees way beyond its capacity over decades) finally gave up the ghost, and could not reliably keep this one standing upright, no matter how we tried to squeeze one last year out of it. So we had no choice but to brave the crazed ho-ho-ho-hordes of shoppers at Home Depot, and pick up an emergency replacement one at the last possible minute. We were lucky that we had only one item (which was not a Christmas tree) and found a self-checkout inside, so we could get on our way in jig time, with visions of sugar plums in our heads and Jack Frost nipping at our nose. Actually, in our heads was the tune of "Garryowen," the signature melody of the fabled 7th Cavalry under General Custer, in recognition of our tree stand's unfortunate "last stand," by George. And while we're on the topic of unfortunate things, it's been dispiriting times for linguistic sticklers lately, I don't mind saying, and I ought to know. First this cropped up on social media, and you can feel free to go right ahead and check this out with our friends at www.adirondackwilderness.org and see for yourself. "The land classification debate in the Adirondacks often strays away from natural resources toward a discussion of what is best for local economies. The underlying tenant of the argument ..... " I can tell by the ill-mannered snickering of our old friends the dinosaurs in The Peanut Gallery that they think I sound like a broken record by now (and isn't THAT an analogy that's lost on young people nowadays!) when I say for the umpteenth time that the spell-checker is not going to help you on that one, if you opt to use the wildly inappropriate word "tenant" in place of the correct word "tenet" in your commentary, alas. And I really don't even want to think about them having any underlying tenants there, which sounds more like the last resting place of ill-fated schnooks who got on the wrong side of Mafia hit men, and did not live to tell the tale, bada-bing. Meanwhile in the TV Section Best Bets, they were singing the praises of the Louisville Cardinals' outstanding Lamar Jackson, leading the pack of Heisman Trophy candidates, who they described, apparently without irony, as a "duel threat quarterback." I don't know who he's planning to have this duel with, but frankly, I don't care much for the other guy's chances. Then there was the sports announcer who pointed out that one of the key players of the team was not performing well in the game, and had been "regulated" to the sidelines. Let's face it, we can't even blame that on the modern pitfall that is auto-correct, changing "relegated" into "regulated," since the comment was verbal and not printed. Just when you start to wonder, to paraphrase the inimitable Casey Stengel, "Can't anybody around here speak this language?" along comes a newspaper article concerning an up-and-coming young starlet, who they assured me was "taking the reigns" of her career, which would ostensibly make her more suitably seated on a throne than on a saddle, I dare say. But in the spirit of Christmas, I suppose we should let these lapses slide, and since it's already the last Sunday in Advent, I figure it must be time to break out the hamantaschen. Oy vey! Elle