Merry Christmas from Hines Terrace Herald

"The people who walked in darkness
Have seen a great light;
Those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
On them has light shone.

For to us a child is born,
To us a son is given,
And the government shall be upon his shoulders,
And his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and of peace
There will be no end... Isaiah 9: 2, 5-7a

“Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home!” 

― Charles Dickens

The Birth of Jesus-Luke 2:1-21

2 In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. ² (This was the first census that took place while^[a] Quirinius was governor of Syria.) ³ And everyone went to their own town to register.

⁴ So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. ⁵ He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child.⁶ While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, ⁷ and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.

⁸ And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. ⁹ An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. ¹⁰ But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. ¹¹ Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. ¹² This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

¹³ Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,

¹⁴ “Glory to God in the highest heaven,
    and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

¹⁵ When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

¹⁶ So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. ¹⁷ When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, ¹⁸ and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. ¹⁹ But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. ²⁰ The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

²¹ On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise the child, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he was conceived.

We hope you have a blessed Christmas,

   David, Mel, and Ford

My Favorite Christmas Carol-Come Thou Long Expected Jesus

I will not say much for the song does all the talk that's necessary for today.  It doesn't get better than this for me in the current season. Thank you, Mr. Wesley for such apropos and most excellent wording. And thank you. Mr. and Mrs. Webb for such a perfect version.  Enjoy. 

An Album Review and a Brief Ramble into My Past with Christmas Music

    It wouldn't take much asking around on your part to find out that Christmas isn't my favorite holiday. Mel calls me a Scrooge and I take that with a grain of salt and move on. She means it with all the love you can pack into a word. Many might find this strange, no, not the witty words of one Sweet Melissa, for she is a wealth of those, but this strange dislike of Christmas. And it is not completely true because there are many aspects of the Yuletide Wonder that I love. I love the eggnog. I love the overwhelming excitement that builds as each day of December ends and blends into the next moving Christmas Day ever closer. I love buying things that people love, hiding them, and watching their faces light up as they open them up. I love not being able to sleep the night before and getting up (yes, still) when it is still dark outside and wondering if Santa has come. I love Christmas Day breakfast and lunch. I love going to look at Christmas lights, both the good kind, but even better are the ridiculous displays where it looked like Ole' St. Nick stashed his favorite Holiday Hoarder. And I love the ritual of gathering all the paper, bows,  boxes, and bags and doing it ever so slowly trying to make sure no one's gift gets thrown in the fire. I love watching the flames as the colored paper causes it to flicker and turn odd colors. I love the smell of a real Christmas tree and the going to get it. I am humbled by the fact that the Maker of the Universe would send His only Son to lowly Earth knowing the ending and all for someone like me who is going to take it all for granted over and over. As you can see, I don't exactly dislike Christmas, but I guess the part I hate is when I stroll into Lowe's, Wal-Mart, Target, or Walgreens, in mid-October and I begin seeing the rise of Christmas items making their ugly presence known two and a half months early. Then Thanksgiving gets almost completely ignored as the infamous"Black Friday" sales become more and more absurd and the violence that goes with it becomes more and more unglued. And at times, I can't seem to get past the bad so that I can look at the good.

     And this is where music comes into play. I actually like Christmas carols and the traditonal favorites sung by Frank, Bing, and Dean. But then when you add to the equation that everyone and their brother, uncle, pastor, dog, llama, chipmunk, cousin, choir, Jewish singer-songwriter, Jewish saxophonist, rap artist, and rock band has their version of the same 15 songs and radio stations begin playing them twenty-four hours a day beginning on what seems like September 1st each year, it is enough to make me go crazy. So, each year, I try to distance myself from the usual and find something that is truly new or at least feels real. Sometimes, an album will give me several years of use before a new one must be found. I listened to Jars of Clay's, Drummer Boy, for about 10 years before something new came around. When I got married, Mel introduced me to an album called, Your King Has Come, but it was already six years old when I got introduced to it. And the Jars of Clay put out, Christmas Songs, in 2007 and that has had to be it for me besides a classical guitar album my older brother gave me as a cd back in '97.

      And this leads us to maybe my five-way tie for all-time favorite artist: Sufjan Stevens. I began listening to him on the back eating porch that we had lovingly dubbed "Schenectady  at Alpine Camp for Boys and things (musically) haven't been the same for me. That was also the summer I began listening to Andrew Bird and wearing Chacos, so I guess we could say 2004 was the year many things changed for me. Sufjan put out a Christmas album in 2006, Songs for Christmas, and it consisted of 42 songs that were a good mixture of traditionals and originals. And it came in a really neat box set that came with all kinds of other goodies. Needless to say, I have been listening to these songs a lot since then; after December 1st, of course!

    And now, this year, 2012, Sufjan has released another Christmas album, Silver and Gold. For the time being, I am willing to say it is even better than the first, Songs for Christmas. I say this for two reasons: 1) it contains 16 more songs 2) the song list contains many more originals and many songs that I've never heard before. The music variety is par for the course if you are used to listening to Mr. Stevens. He does not stray far from what we've come to know from him and I for one am glad of this. There are slow, soft tunes, then there are rowdy sing-alongs, and then there are the 15 minute songs that take you from slow reverence to techno chaos in the span of a quarter of an hour. Those songs are really something else. 

   However, as usual, I find it very hard to explain in words how exactly a Sufjan album sounds to me. So, I will try to explain it like this, the songs from, Silver and Gold, make me feel like I did when I was a little boy and Christmas was still something I looked forward to for so long and so hard that I would wake my tired parents at 4 AM in an effort to begin Christmas Day. Or it makes me feel like the little boy who would ride with his older brother as fast as their bikes would carry them to the end of Venetian Village with the cold wind burning their noses and lips in an effort to meet their grandparents and get to ride in the back of their truck home. It was almost as if they were bringing the whole of Christmas with them in the back of that old, muddy Ford F150. Or it makes me feel like the little boy who used to sit through the chaos of Christmas Mass waiting for the crowd to leave, so they could rush back to his grandparents house near the river, so that they could make the ritualistic trip around Roundtree Drive to look at Christmas lights so grandpa could change into the Santa suit and burst through the door and we could pretend for a brief moment that he was Santa and not a grandpa who smelled of boiled custard and scotch. These are how the songs make me feel. They dredge up the memories many Christmases past and they dangle them in front of me and I get to relive them. 

Buy the album, listen loudly, and have a Merry Christmas,

     David

This Week's Wisdom for Writing

This post has been waiting to be finished for the last two weeks. Many things have changed since then, but a few are still the same. Hope you enjoy the post. Better late than never. JDD

   The past week, this current week, and the next two weeks have been and will be full of life's many obligations and issues. The main one is that my Fall semester is coming to a screeching halt and that means final notes, Open House, the infamous "test" before the midterm, exams, grading, conferences, emails, meetings,  subject reviews, peer reviews, finalized curriculum plans, and salt-n-pepper in there a lot more grading and you will have about 1/2 of what I have been up to. Also, Fordzilla (See pic below. He looks so innocent, but know he is not!) has outsourced his sleep patterns overseas and just doesn't do much of it anymore. Which is ok for him, I guess, but it makes everything else just a tad bit harder. I did want to update my blog this week though and I really wanted to share some more of Steinbeck's, Journal of a Novel, with you. I hope you aren't getting tired of the excepts. If you are, we are almost done with them. I just feel there is so much to be gleaned from them whether you are a writer, a reader, or even just a human being living on the planet.

"The writer's of today, even I, have a tendency to celebrate the destruction of the spirit and god knows it is destroyed often enough. But the beacon thing is that sometimes it is not. And I think I can take time right now to say that. There will be great sneers from the neurosis belt of the south from the hard-boiled writers, but I believe that the great ones, Plato, Lao Tze, Buddha....,Christ, Paul, and the great Hebrew prophets are not remembered for negation or denial. Not that it is necessary to be remembered but there is one purpose in writing that I can see, beyond simply doing it interestingly. It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage. If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half developed culture, it is this: Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice. And how any negative or despairing approach can pretend to be literature I do not know." Pg. 115-116


"And in other ways I seem to have been writing on this book all of my life. And throughout, you will find things that remind you of earlier work. That earlier work was practice for this, I am sure. And that is why I want this book to be good, because it is the first book. The rest was practice." Pg. 117


"To a certain extent I have thought about the reception of this book. And it seems to me that it might find a public ready for the open and honest. As you know the novel has been falling before the onslaught of non-fiction. That is largely because the novel has not changed for a very long time now. Sherwood Anderson made the modern novel and has not gone much beyond him. I think I am going beyond him. This may be rejected and kicked down but I do not think so. I really don't. However, this is a conjecture which will be demonstrated." Pg. 124 


"A book is as complicated as life, in some ways more complicated." Pg. 128


"I must have great violence in me because I react to violence in nature with great joy. And a good thunder roll makes me feel almost as though I could do it myself." Pg. 131

"...It is about time for something like that. and it is also time for gaiety. the death of Samuel has removed gaiety from the world. And I have to put some back in. For Eden must be everything, not only the grim and terrible because that isn't the way life is. Life is silly too sometimes and that must be in it. Everything I have seen or heard or thought must go in and I feel the necessity for release now." Pg. 131

"A book finished, published, read--is always an anticlimax to me. The joy comes in words going down and the rhythms crowding in the chest and pulsing to get out." Pg. 132

"I have been planting the book full of restlessness which precedes change. Just as history seems to ride up a series of plateaus, so does it seem to me that a man's life goes--up a little or down and then a flat place, and then another quick change and another plateau. In a book about a man, because of the restriction of space, the distance between the rises or falls is necessarily small and this must give a feeling of unreality." Pg. 134

"A cousin of mine--Pat Hamilton, son of George, grandson of Samuel and the only bearer of the name, the only one (isn't that odd)--died two days ago. He was an incurable alcoholic and died of a heart attack after a two-weeks' drunk. And there lies that family name. I have the blood and my sons but he had the name. I feel badly that he did not wear it well. He left it no pride and surely no shine. In fact he dirtied it...This is the tragedy of a name." Pg. 138

"A book, as you know, is a very delicate thing. If it is pressured , it will show that pressure." Pg. 139

"A book takes so long that people get tired of waiting. I know that. But I said at the beginning that this had to be written as though it would never get done." Pg. 139

"Today I have to do something I haven't done in this whole book. I have to eliminate some of yesterday's work and change the pace I had set for it. It has not been often. It was just wrong. But I don't mind. And surely that is a minimum." Pg. 144

"Maybe good, maybe bad. But I shall want to draw the reader into the personal so that he is reading about himself." Pg 145

"It has been good, but good things should not last too long or they cease to be good things." Pg. 145

Happy Reading,

   David