Happy Saint Nicholas Day! Happy first night of Chanukah!
Jo Kay of Beyond Strange New Words will host the Virtual Advent Tour today. She shares some great information about Saint Nicholas and his celebration.
But first, please enjoy “Last Tree” from singer-songwriter Ellis Paul:
This Sunday is my annual tree-trimming party, which I first threw 19 years ago. Having recently graduated from college myself, I knew first-hand that it was a little sad for my university student employees to have to miss out on family holiday prep, so I invited them over to help me decorate. I no longer work at a college, but the tradition lives on, as does the panic and chaos of inviting a horde of people into my untidy and overcrowded apartment.
Below you’ll find a reprise of my post from last year when I offered my instructions for How to Throw a (Christmas) Party:
1. Set the date of the party sufficiently far in advance. (Mine has been the second Sunday after Thanksgiving since I started throwing them for my college interns and my friends the year after I graduated college myself. Nineteen years is considered sufficient.)
2. Invite guests early enough so that can fit your event into a busy holiday season. If you have essentially reserved a date for yourself for two decades, this can be slightly closer to the event … such as when repeat guests start asking when the invitation is going to arrive.
3. Begin to clean your home. Depending how often this occurs at other times of the year, it may be necessary to place this higher in your timeline. In my case, I ought to have started the day after my last party.
4. Procrastinate. Allow sufficient time for this. Consider starting a large and detailed and difficult-to-relocate project right in your main party space. You work better under a deadline, after all.
5. Clean some more in a haphazard fashion. Preferably stop one project partway through and leave it behind as if Mr. Clean has been swept through your living space by a hurricane.
6. Take a nap. Make some food. You need to keep up your strength after all.
7. Tackle a small part of the paper you ought to recycle the night before the final recycling is picked up before your party. By small, I mean a handful of envelopes. By night before, I mean 4 a.m.
8. Start to hit a frenzy. Of course you’ll get this all done! There’s plenty of time. By that, I mean two days. Almost.
9. Buy party supplies. In my case, this involves a tree, food, drinks, and paper products. Why does this grocery store not carry half the things you want? Are three bags of chips enough? Where, for the love of all things merry, is the vegan eggnog?!
10. Despair. Is it too late to uninvite all the guests 16 hours before the party is due to start? Or maybe just turn out all the lights and pretend not to be home?
11. Prioritize. A clean bathroom and a clean kitchen are important. People are willing to overlook dust, but they like a clean sink; remember, though, you can still lock yourself in the bathroom to do a spot clean after the first guests arrive.
12. Why have you never noticed all the cat fur and cat litter tracked all over the place? Oh, no, wait. You totally have. You just opted to overlook it.
13. Eat chocolate and drink tea. This will keep your mind off the fact that you have not left yourself enough time to sleep.
14. Stop to write a blog post. (Or, even, a whole series of them that you’ve publicly committed to.) Because we all know that helps.
15. Tackle the biggest non-loud projects in the middle of the night. Then you can pretend your tears are from the strain, rather than the knowledge that you will not finish in time.
16. Get some sleep. Two hours is a nice amount for a long day ahead. You wouldn’t want to get groggy.
17. Calculate the time the stores open that sell the things you forgot or couldn’t find. Arrive as they unlock their doors.
18. Give up on prioritizing. Now you are just going to work on moving/hiding/minimizing the mess. Lacking a bedroom door and extensive closet space makes this a challenge.
19. Chuck papers into bags. Make sure you note which bag contains the important/recent papers because inevitably you will need it tomorrow. This stage is not unlike moving apartments, at least for me.
20. Pile everything on your bed.
21. Try to vacuum before your guests arrive. (This will not always happen.)
22. Try to be done cooking before your guests arrive. (This will rarely happen.)
23. Assume that any guest that arrives promptly at the time you’ve said your party begins is interested in helping you clean and cook. Otherwise, why would they be there already?
24. Have an absolutely wonderful time with your guests during your party. These people are your friends and they really don’t care if you forgot to get rid of those cobwebs you just noticed in a dark corner or if they have to eat home-cooked chili out of a chipped bowl … or a (clean) reused takeaway container.
25. After your last guest has left, collapse on your couch and admire your lovely clean party space. Because you’re never going to bed with all that crap on it.
Today marks the first day you get content from someone besides me with the beginning of the actual tour portion of the Virtual Advent Tour. Visit Molly at Revising Life after 50 today for her family’s recipe for making gingerbread houses. (Now is where I confess that I’ve never made a gingerbread house and SO want to. Thanks, Molly!)
I don’t know about you, but I really enjoy it when artists take a song, particularly one we all know, and rework it to make it their own.
Earlier this week, No Sleep Records released their latest holiday album, No Sleep ’till Christmas 7. The final track off the EP, performed by Rocky Votolato, is “Silent Night,” and really quite a nice version. Give it a listen yourself:
You can stream all five songs here and can download the full EP for whatever price you deem it worth.
Every Thursday I share beautiful things from the previous week. These are just three of this week’s:
1. I run into Panera, a fast-food bakery/restaurant, for a bagel for a late lunch. The guy at the counter throws a second bagel into the bag and asks me to grab a free cup of coffee or tea as his treat.
2. A seven-and-a-half hour commute home on a holiday weekend. (For comparison, our fastest ever drive from Connecticut to D.C. was six-and-a-half hours, which we managed just once in the past 12 years. Normally it’s eight’ish.)
3. After days of grey and rain, this morning I awoke to sunshine and brilliant blue skies.
How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world this week?
R.H. Macy is supposedly the mastermind behind the animated department store holiday window display, having created one in 1883, in which Santa’s sleigh was mechanized and moved around a track set up across his New York City’s store’s front windows.
After that, department stores in major cities would compete informally to see who could create the most talked about windows of the season.
While this competition still exists in New York City, it has faded in many other places, at least among large retailers, who often find themselves in buildings without display windows.
Macy’s carries on, however, exporting their designs from their NYC flagship store to their other stores across the country.
This year’s windows celebrate some well-loved tv specials: A Charlie Brown Christmas (marking its 50th anniversary this year), Yes, Virginia, and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.
These windows in downtown D.C. attract a lot of attention every year. The local day cares trundle their wards out to see them, and I’ve seen people out in the evening taking them in, too.
It’s always very exciting to see what the theme for the year is, and the store holds a formal unveiling of their windows the week before Thanksgiving.
Links to other holiday happenings on the web:
I’m still looking for bloggers who are interested in participating in the Virtual Advent Tour. You can sign up and request a date in the comments on the Dec. 1 post.
Welcome back! Thanks to everyone who left comments on yesterday’s post expressing interest in participating. I’m looking forward to reading your posts!
Today, I thought I’d offer you videos of songs released the year I was born and the years I turned 10, 20, 30, and 40.
Christmas 1974, “Lonely This Christmas,” Mud
I’ll be honest: I don’t think I’ve ever heard this song before, although I suppose if I had, I would have assumed it was Elvis singing it. Believe it or not, it spent four years atop the charts in the UK during December ’74–January ’75.
Christmas 1984, “You Make Me Feel like Christmas,” Neil Diamond
We were a Neil Diamond family when I was growing up, so this got a lot of airtime in our household. 1984 also marked the release of Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”
Christmas 1994, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Mariah Carey
It’s so hard to believe this song didn’t come out until my junior year of college. One of the few modern Christmas classics, the song serves as the text of Carey’s new Christmas picture book and helped cement Carey’s place on the list of best-selling musicians of all-time.
Christmas 2004, “Believe,” Josh Groban
2004 was not a particularly good year for Christmas music, but included the release of the sweet animated film The Polar Express, based on one of my favorite Christmas picture books, and “Believe,” which won a Grammy Award.
Christmas 2014, “Text Me Merry Christmas,” Straight No Chaser featuring Kristen Bell
This song was written by frequent collaborators David Javerbaum, the comedy writer behind the Tweet of God Twitter account, and Adam Schlesinger, bassist for Fountains of Wayne.
Links to other holiday happenings on the web: