One Week Away...

Thank The Source It's Friday!

"Good luck finding a parking spot, mortals! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Brown Christmas

Thanks to that Irving Berlin song Bing Crosby made famous (which will be conspicuously absent from the Christmas music I'm featuring as send-offs this month), lots of people in this part of the country spend lots of time the last week before Christmas talking about a "white" Christmas, meaning a Christmas with significant snowfall. Something like this...

This year, the odds of that are slim, as there is no precipitation of any kind in the forecast for this area until Sunday, December 27.

It seems to me that the overall sentiment is in favor of a White Christmas, but speaking as someone who has seen more than his share of Christmas blizzards (including one during my time living in Wyoming that caused me to miss Christmas with my family altogether), I'm okay if we have a Brown Christmas this year.

"Spoken like an old man..."

Which I am, in case you haven't noticed...

Traditions

One Christmas tradition for me is baking cookies using my "special" recipe (and I'll be trying a new twist on it this year, too), but I also have enjoyed the famous Royal Dansk Danish Butter Cookies for many, many years.

I don't recall exactly when that tradition actually got started with me, but I do know that I can't remember the last Christmas where I didn't have a tin of those heavenly cookies to snack on as I went about my Christmas morning.

I haven't seen them yet this year in the grocery stores I usually frequent, but I'm hopeful of picking some up later this afternoon...

Christmas Movies & TV Shows

On December 18, 1966 a cultural phenomenon got its start when CBS first broadcast the animated special Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

As they had the previous year with A Charlie Brown Christmas, CBS tapped in to the sentiment that Christmas had become too commercialized. The show was a gentle reminder that Christmas isn't really about all the trappings, and the presents, and the food...

Although it has been broadcast annually each Christmas season since its debut, and has even spawned a live-action motion picture and a musical, I don't watch it as often as I do the Peanuts-based special, because there just aren't as many memorable scenes in it, and because there's only so much Dr. Seuss poetry I can tolerate.

First broadcast during prime time on a Sunday evening, the cartoon special was done
by famed Warner Bros director Chuck Jones, and the narration was provided by the inimitable Boris Karloff.

"There is...that one scene...that always gets me..."

Me too, old friend, me too...

The Law of Unintended Consequences

From the pen of Henry Payne, whose editorial cartoons you should read often, as I do.

Until Next Time...

When I was a young man in Catholic school one of the carols I most enjoyed singing during the annual Christmas choir performances was "The First Noël," because it was a relatively easy song to master. It's simplicity appeals to me even today. My favorite versions of the song, which lyrically brings together elements of the Nativity story from the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, aren't the soaring choral versions (although I do appreciate the beauty of those). I would rather hear renditions that keep things simple, and humble. That seems to me a better fit for the lyrics than more elaborate productions.

Lady Antebellum is an award-winning country music trio formed in 2006. They have considerable "crossover" appeal with people who don't generally listen to country music. They released a Christmas album, On This Winter's Night, in 2012. The album reached No. 8 on the Billboard 200 album chart, and No. 1 on its Top Holiday Albums chart.

Today's send-off is their simple, beautiful rendition of the classic carol, without a lot of bells and whistles. Enjoy...