Much of what I’ve said so far about Christmas has been traceable back to my mother, with respect to food and decorations. Now it’s my father’s turn, because it transpires that much of my seasonal music comes from him.

The Messiah is our first example. Sure, Handel wrote it for Easter, but it’s become Christmas music since then, and not just for my family. Lots of places have “Messiah sings” in December. We used to go to one every year; I can’t remember where it was*, though I can visualize the room almost perfectly. There was a small professional choir, whose soloists performed some of the arias and recitatives and so on, and then for the choral pieces the audience would stand up and sing along. The tenors were perenially weak — which was a very great pity because my mother’s voice, and mine once I got older, are on the low side of alto. (With training I could probably pass for an alto. With my present lack of an upper range, I find the tenor part more comfortable than any other. It only occasionally goes too low for me.) Really, though, we tended to grab whatever line we could hear and follow, even if we were in the wrong octave.

I associate The Messiah with my father because there’s a long-running tradition of it in his Ohio hometown. A few years back, they had their hundredth anniversary performance, and invited anybody who had ever sung with them to come back for the event. And make no mistake, it was an Event: most groups only perform a selection of pieces from the whole, but for this anniversary they staged the entire thing, all five or six or however many hours of it, with a dinner in the middle. Sadly, neither my brother nor I was able to go along. I’m still sad I missed it.

We used to have a five-CD changer hooked up to our speakers, and would put five Christmas albums on shuffle, of which one in any given load might be a volume of The Messiah. That was always a little weird, because there are tracks that are all of sixteen or thirty-five seconds long, brief transitions between one piece and another, that I’m not very familiar with, and which sound weird out of context. But “And he shall purify” and “Lift up your heads” and (of course) the “Hallelujah Chorus” are staples of the season.

*My mother, who is sitting next to me frantically trying to finish cross-stitching a stocking for my brother’s fiancee, tells me it was at UTD.

It’s going to take me several posts to get through the music I associate with this season.

First up, since my mother and I were talking about it earlier today: The Nutcracker. The ballet itself is not one of my favorites; I like the second act well enough, but so much of the first act is taken up by people wandering around being at the Christmas party, without much in the way of actual dancing going on. I do, however, adore the music, most especially “Trepak” (the Russian dance) and “Coffee” (the Arabian dance), but also standards like “The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy.”

Really, I just kind of adore Tchaikovsky overall. Him and Prokofiev. If I sat down to work it out, they’d probably turn out to be two of my favorite classical composers.

Most of the other music I want to talk about will deserve separate posts — there’s a story behind much of it — so I’ll just use the rest of my time here to bring up Christmas music overall. We have a number of compliation CDs that are a part of the season for me just because I’ve been listening to them for ten, twenty years; there isn’t anything particularly special about them. I do not, however, like everything on them equally. In general, my favorite carols are the ones played less often, which I doubt is coincidence: I don’t get bludgeoned with them every time I turn on the TV or walk into a store, so I haven’t gotten tired of them yet. But I also like them for a reason that probably feeds back into them not being played as often: many of them are in minor keys, or otherwise darker-sounding. You can keep your “Away in a Manger” and your “Jingle Bells” and most especially your bloody “Sleigh Ride*;” give me “Coventry Carol” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “Carol of the Bells” and “We Three Kings,” “What Child Is This” and “Oh Come Emmanuel” and most especially “O Holy Night,” about which I will have more to say later.

Favorite carols? Least favorite? Anything you’d rather rupture your eardrums with a spork than listen to?

*It should be noted that my hatred of “Sleigh Ride” has less to do with the song than the fact that I had to play it. On French horn. Which meant six goddamned pages of upbeats. My hatred of “Sleigh Ride” is just my hatred of marches transposed to the Christmas season. “Rudoloph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” on the other hand, I hate because I had to play it, but not because of upbeats; that one we played in a parade, and two hours of any carol alternating with a drum cadence is pretty much guaranteed to make you hate the carol.

Meant to post about this last week, when we had our annual Christmas movie-watching party, but the Death Bug got in the way.

This is a new tradition; this is something kniedzw and I have started, not inherited from either side of the family. Every year we spend an afternoon and evening watching Christmas movies, and we invite other people over to join us.

But this isn’t your normal Christmas movie marathon. I’ve got no particular patience for It’s a Wonderful Life and 99% of the other usual suspects. If you want to watch those, all you have to do is turn on the TV. We? Go for other Christmas movies.

Like Die Hard.

Oh, there’s one usual suspect in there: How the Grinch Stole Christmas. (The REAL one. The only one that exists. If you bring up Jim Carrey I will blink owlishly at you and ask what you’re talking about.) I suspect I watch that movie primarily for the song “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” the rest of it being icing on the cake, but it’s great throughout, really. I mean, how can you beat Dr. Seuss? You can’t.

You can, however, watch The Nightmare Before Christmas, which I’m never sure if I should count as a Halloween movie or a Christmas one. Either way, I love it. Also Blackadder’s Christmas Carol — much preferable to Dickens’ version — and The Lion in Winter, which is the only “dysfunctional family working out their issues when they get together for the holidays” film I can stomach, probably because their method of working out issues involves plotting palace coups. And finally, no, I wasn’t kidding about Die Hard. What? It takes place at a Christmas party. It features things like “NOW I HAVE A MACHINE GUN — HO HO HO” written on the sweatshirt of a dead German terrorist/thief. It’s totally in the Christmas spirit!

It’s in my Christmas spirit, anyway.

What films do you like watching at this time of year?

Today kniedzw picked up at the farmers’ market something that could pass for Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. It’s perfect for our purposes, though; we’re flying to Dallas on Saturday, and weren’t organized enough to get a tree sooner, so it doesn’t make sense to drop lots of cash on anything big. And it’s cute.

Real trees are weird to me, though. My parents eventually figured out that maybe there was a reason their asthmatic son kept landing in the hospital around Christmas, so it’s been a fake tree for as long as I can remember. Which does have some advantages; I don’t want to know how much you’d have to pay for a real ten-foot tree that’s even half so bushy and full. But anyway, while fake trees are the order of business in my mind, I do not object to the real ones. Artificiality of greenery is not a requirement in my holiday.

What is apparently a requirement, judging by the smile with which I greeted it this year, is woven straw. It’s a very Scandinavian thing, I think, though it pops up in other cultures. My family recently retired one of our sadder mobiles in favor of something less worn-out, but I adopted the old one, so now I have some straw angels and hearts hanging in my entryway, and a little straw angel ornament on the tree. Like winter soup, this is something inherited from my mother. (My father’s influence will show up elsewhere.)

In general, though, our ornamentation — especially on the tree — is eclectic with a vengeance. We do not have a designer tree. We have keychains and necklace pendants from all around the world, souvenirs brought home to double as tree jewelry. We have Buddhist prayer ornaments.

We have a two-inch piece of split copper pipe inscribed with the date “December 25th, 1989.”

This one has a story. 1989, Dallas did one of its sporadic freezes, like it does. I think the high on Christmas Eve was maybe in the 20s. The day after Christmas, we were scheduled to get on a plane and fly to the British Virgin Islands for a sailing trip. Christmas Day . . . Christmas Day warmed up into the 40s or so. And some time after we opened presents, my mother wandered back into the master bath and felt the carpet go squish.

You know where this is going.

My grandparents were visiting that year, as I recall, so my father and grandfather went out back and started bashing away at the wall. They were lucky; the first brick they took out was directly over the broken bit of pipe. Then they noticed that, having taken a brick out, they were looking right at the pipe! . . . yeah, the layer cake of the wall went outside-bricks-pipes-insulation-inside. Brilliant construction, that. Anyway, they fixed the pipe — my memory insists that the “Hallelujah” chorus came on the CD shuffle when they came in to announce it was done — and the pipe piece wound up on the tree as an ornament. One year somebody stole it off and got it engraved, and it has occupied a position of pride ever since. This has become a family conversation piece to the point that this year, when my brother announced that he and his fiancee had bought a tree (a real one; here’s hoping his lungs don’t collapse) and were inviting people to bring ornaments, I went to Home Depot and bought him a piece of copper pipe.

(Actually, I bought a longer piece and hacked off a chunk for him, a chunk for me. My own copper pipe is currently serving as a tree topper, since we don’t have an angel or star.)

I love having a decorated house for Christmas. The density of decoration has gotten a little ridiculous at home — we’re pretty sure our ornaments sit up in the attic all year and breed — but I love the greenery, the red and silver and gold, the way the house puts on a different dress for a little while. The decorations are really the source of my conviction that the Christmas season begins the day after Thanksgiving: once my brother and I went away to college, we got in the habit of putting everything up while we were home for break. Christmas ends (of course) on Epiphany, not because I’m Catholic but because I need some kind of landmark to end on, and New Year’s is too soon. Anyway, these things — garlands, ornaments of woven straw, all that good stuff — are special because they only get brought out for a little while. As much as I love them, I wouldn’t want them around all the time, because then they would cease to be special.