Pen and Ink

On the third day of Christmas.

I'm spending the evening with Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops at the final Holiday Pops concert of the season. It doesn't get much better than this.

The Christmas call.

It's Christmas morning, and I'm all settled in at Mom and Dad's in New Jersey, accompanied by holiday music on the radio and the warmth of the Christmas tree, against a setting of snow from blizzard that hit last weekend.

This is from my parents' tree two years ago.

Andy's on his way up from Miami, to be met at the airport by my sister and brother-in-law. When they get here, we'll have the Christmas strada that my father prepared yesterday. Soon, my nieces and nephew and sister will be joining us. We'll open gifts and enjoy the Honey Baked Ham that I ordered.

There are gifts under the tree, and like a kid, I can't wait to see what's there for me. (Andy already gave me his present -- a gorgeous Cole Haan messenger bag that I had fawned over a couple of months ago.)

Cole Haan aside (it really was so wonderful of him to give it to me), the best present of the season was one that I received last Sunday, in the form of a phone call.

"Do you know who this is?," inquired the woman's voice associated with the phone number I did not know.

"No, who is this?"

After a pause, she said, "It's Liz."

Wait. It's not Liz from work, because her number wouldn't have appeared on the screen. It wasn't "Auntie Liz," my uncle's wife (technically my aunt, but we're very close in age, so it seems funny). Liz?

Wait, no way!

It was Liz B., a dear friend from my 20s, someone with whom I had not spoken for about 15 years (or so we figured out during the call.)

Liz and I met through a mutual friend. We were part of a small group that danced our way through every Saturday night at Rumsellers, a long gone bar in New Jersey. She was more than a bar friend, mind you. We shared a lot and had a wonderful friendship.

But as things happen, we lost track of each other. I moved to Boston, she married. I moved to Florida and she took off for Texas.  She found me on LinkedIn in October and sent me a note. I responded, but never heard back.

And then her call.

It was wonderful catching each other up with our lives and reminiscing. (I only need to hear the first couple of bars of Laura Branigan's "Gloria" and I'm transported back to Rumsellers in the 80s; Liz and I had our own choreography for that particular song.)

That call was the best Christmas present I could receive this year.

For anyone reading this, I hope your holiday is just as happy.

Whose Christmas Is It?

In this multicultural time in which we live, I loved this piece by musician Michael Feinstein in last Friday's Times. I was going to paraphrase it here, but decided that the full text was just too good. So I am including it here.

* * * * *

ABOUT 10 years ago, I was doing a weekend of Christmas concerts, accompanied by a fine regional symphony in California. The first night went well, I thought, with a program of holiday classics that seemed beyond reproach. The song choices were about as controversial as a Creamsicle.

Ron Barrett

But I was wrong. Minutes before I walked onstage the second night, a nervous representative of the orchestra board appeared in my dressing room to tell me that my program was “too Jewish.” Wow, I thought, who knew that orchestra management played practical jokes on artists moments before their shows? My laughter turned to disbelief when the stuttering gentleman said that there had, in fact, been complaints.

Between numbers the night before, I had mentioned that almost all the most popular Christmas songs were written by Jews and then riffed on the idea that the Gentiles must have written mostly Hanukkah songs. The audience was enthusiastic, so I assumed it was somebody on the board who had been offended.

Just as I was informing the unlucky messenger that the second night’s show would be “even more Jewish,” places were called. I bounded onstage in time to belt out the opening lines of “We Need a Little Christmas,” wearing a fake grin that barely concealed my rage. After a while, the music calmed me down, and I was able to merge with the holiday spirit encoded in the Jerry Herman classic. The Jewish Jerry Herman Christmas classic.

The evolution of Christmas is reflected to a degree in its music. As the holiday has become more secular, so have its songs, with religious and spiritual compositions largely supplanted by the banalities of Rudolph, sleigh bells and Santa. Many Christians feel that the true essence of Christmas has been lost, and I respect that opinion. It must be difficult to see religious tradition eroded in the name of commerce and further dissipated by others’ embrace of a holiday without a sense of what it truly means to the faithful.

Yet I also hope that those who feel this encroachment will on some level understand that the spirit of the holiday is universal. We live in a multicultural time and the mixing, and mixing up, of traditions is an inevitable result. Hence we have the almost century-old custom of American Jews creating a lot more Christmas music than Hanukkah music.

If you look at a list of the most popular Christmas songs, you’ll find that the writers are disproportionately Jewish: Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” “The Christmas Song” (yes, Mel Tormé was Jewish), “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!,” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” “Silver Bells,” “Santa Baby,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Winter Wonderland” — perennial, beloved and, mostly, written for the sheet music publishers of Tin Pan Alley, not for a show or film. (Two notable exceptions: “White Christmas,” introduced in “Holiday Inn,” and “Silver Bells,” written for “The Lemon Drop Kid.”)

You’ll notice that certain famous Jewish songwriters are conspicuously absent from this list. Why? Unlike the Tin Pan Alley songwriters, who churned out songs to order on every conceivable subject for their publishers, writers like Jerome Kern, the Gershwins, Richard Rodgers and Harold Arlen mainly created songs for musical plays and films, and unless a story line required a holiday song they had no need to write one. When they did try one outside the framework of a show, it rarely had the same spark. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Happy Christmas, Little Friend,” recorded by Rosemary Clooney in the ’50s, is sadly lethargic. Even Clooney couldn’t recall it when asked to sing it 30 years later. Or so she claimed.

In my holiday shows, I’m always looking for novel expressions of the season, and when I introduce a new song I don’t usually think about the religion of its creator. That said, I’m always pleased to discover a surprising juxtaposition. It doesn’t take Freud to figure out that the sugarplums, holly and mistletoe all tap into a sense of comfort, longing, security and peace that so many fervently desire; that we all wish the clichés were true. As Jews, Christians, Muslims, Mormons, Buddhists and everything in between, we are all more alike than we are different. That’s something to celebrate.

Michael Feinstein is a musician and the author of “My Life in Song.”

Random Christmas Thoughts.

Tree for Rent

I like this piece from the New York Times last week: There's some Christmas spirit in even the grinchiest of people. The story was about a guy from Torrance, California, who despite being "bummed" by false merriment and gift obligations, has developed a wonderful holiday business.

A landscaper by profession, he grew unhappy at the sight of post-Christmas trees lying about after the holiday.  So he came up with a simple idea: rent a Christmas tree, and return it, alive, to the nursery. Brilliant, huh?

He now has repeat customers who request the same tree each year. Kinda like a family member who comes to visit for the holidays. Check out his website at www.livingchristmas.com.

E-Christmas Cards

It appears to me that there was a rise in popularity of e-cards this Christmas. Well, I say "bah-humbug."

I write cards each year. Not hundreds, but to those people I don't see regularly. I also do them for professional contacts.

No labels, no computer printing. I hand write the persons name in the card, jot a little message, and sign it. Then I personally address the envelopes.

The purpose of a card, to my mind, is to say to someone, "I am thinking about you."  E-cards, blasted out to who knows how many people, just aren't the same. The only exception I make to that, however, is those who send an e-card to me and actually personalized a note with it.  That's OK. It still tells me that the person had me in his or her thoughts.

 

Of Christmases Past

Two years ago, returning to my parents for Christmas, I was informed that I had the honor of decorating the tree for the first time in years.

I started rummaging through boxes, pulling out all of the decorations of my childhood. I came to a box filled with mini-lights and one strand, still in the box, of the old-fashioned C-7 lights. Hold on! Stop everything!

We bundled up and I dragged my parents to Target and I filled the cart with more C-7 lights. Not the clear ones, but the frosted ones, just like we had back in the 60s.

Once home, the tree was decorated with the new lights and all the old ornaments. It looked just like it was when I was a kid.

Once I returned home from that trip, I made a beeline to Target and bought about a dozen boxes during the after-Christmas sale. Last year, they made it onto my tree, along with all the Shiny Brite reproductions that I've been collecting.

I did the tree the same way this year, much to the delight of a number of my guests. Any number of people commented that the tree brought them back to their own childhoods.  And at least one person called a few days later, asking for guidance on their search for the same lights.

Christmas Classics

I'm a Christmas geek, as if you couldn't tell. The music, the traditions, the movies...all of it.  For a month now, I've been thinking about the old black and white, Laurel and Hardy film March of the Wooden Soldiers.  It's been decades, probably, since I've seen it, and just about as long since I've even thought of it. You used to be able to catch it on TV, but I don't even know if anyone airs it.

The other day I was in BJs to pick up a couple of things. I can't pass the DVD section without looking, and there, on end cap with the thin stock of holiday films left, was a copy of March of the Wooden Soldiers. For $9.99, even!

So when I get to my parents, we'll be watching this classic, along with Scrooged, the Bill Murray film of 1989 or so, another classic in my book.

Creative spark.

Growing up, I was surrounded by creative people.  My father is a photographer.  My grandmother was a painter, mostly portraits and still lives. My uncle is a working artist (four of his pieces adorn the walls of my living room), and my sister has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. When we was working, she designed fabric ribbons, painting each design while eschewing computer technology.

For the longest time, I didn't think I had any creative talent, that the gene had somehow passed me by.

I've been thinking about creativity a lot and it's occurred to me that I am a highly creative person, but just not necessarily in the visual arts.  (That said, though, I've been getting a lot of really positive feedback about my photography.)

These past couple of months have been an unbelievable creative surge, and perhaps the reason why I haven't blogged in a couple of months.

A few weeks ago Andy and I hosted my/our annual holiday party (it was our first together).  We had about 50-something people out of the 70-something who were expected. We started early planning in September, believe it or not. I spent hours pouring over cookbooks to plan the menu, especially my desserts.  The sweet table could induce a diabetic coma with just one look.

For weeks Andy and I talked about how we would decorate the house. He had a vision for floating decorations in the pool. We went out in October to get the supplies, only to completely redesign the concept just days before the party.

The whole party, replete with 10 foot Christmas tree that I was cajoled into getting, was a terrific hit. People had a great time mixing and mingling, and the left overs are just about gone. Only after everything was put back into place did I realize what a tremendous creative endeavor it was.

Simultaneously, I've been going through a similar creative surge at work. For three years, the college where I work has been developing a culinary school. The administrator and consultant who were leading the charge on this endeavor both left at the end of June, just days before a permanent director was to come on board. Amazingly, I found myself pretty much the only person with the grand vision for the school, the keeper of the big picture story that we had been sharing with potential corporate partners.

So John, the new director showed up right after the 4th of July and I found myself taking him under my wing, introducing him to all the players in Miami, filling him in on every last detail of what we'd been working on for the past three years. I helped him navigate the organizational bureaucracy, and ultimately, started translating his vision to our potential partners.

And what a creative ride it's been. John jokingly says that I am the co-director of the school, as I've become intimately involved with more than just fundraising. We're figuring out strategies to develop an audience for the restaurant planned for the school, thinking about wine and food festival strategies that will market the school. We're even developing a television show for the college's station, a show that I am apparently going to co-host (they'll put anyone on the air, I guess).

I guess artistry comes in many forms -- writing, photography, decorating, baking and cooking -- even helping to launch a culinary school.

Can I call myself an artist?