It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Hanukkah!

Just kidding!

Not that it doesn’t look like Hanukkah or anything.

But Christmas—CHRISTMAS!—is in two short weeks!

You always know it’s getting to be the holidays when stores start playing Christmas music all the time. What I don’t entirely understand is, why don’t they play GOOD Christmas music? They always seem to pick the most horrible carols, sung by the most awful singers of all time. I can sing better than some of these people.

So, to go along with last year’s favorite Christmas Carols post, this one is about least favorites.

Yesterday I was in Shoprite (I do not reccommend going to Shoprite on Tuesday because that is apparently Large Quantities of Elderly People Run Over Your Toes With Their Shopping Carts Day) and they were playing an average bad Christmas album, when “Deck The Halls” came on. Deck The Halls, as I have always understood it, is a fairly peppy tune, which is meant to be sung as follows: “Deck the halls with boughs of holly, falalalalaaalalala” etc. If you are like me and have speed issues, you may wish to sing it like this: “Deckthehallswithboughsofholly, falalalalalaaaalalalala”. Either of these renditions is perfectly acceptable.
The man on the intercom, however, was not singing it like that. He wasn’t even singing it slowly. He was singing at approximately 32bpm, which is as slow as my metronome will even GO. As far as I can tell, this is a man who was out late at a holiday party and had a LOT of eggnog before he decided to make this recording. See actual rendition:
Deck…the…halls…with…boughs…of….hollllyyyy….
fa…la…la…la…laaaaaaaaaaa…la…la….la….la…..

PLUS he sang it in a nasal voice.

So why won’t stores play decent Christmas music?

These are the main songs I heard while out shopping:

-All We Are Saying is Give Peace a Chance
-Jingle Bells
-Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer
-Baby It’s Cold Outside
-Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
-Frosty the Snowman
-Carol of the Bells
-We Wish You a Merry Christmas

I don’t really even like most of these songs. Especially not Give Peace a Chance.

So, do any of you have a Christmas song that you just can’t stand?

And, Happy Holidays!

That was a joke, but last Sunday at the band concert our director (Yes, this is the cosmos man) said, quote, “Our last tune is We Wish You a Merry Christmas, and we do hope that you have a happy holidays, no matter what you believe.” And he was dead serious.

Randomness

The Friar Chuck Update: Friar Chuck versions 1,2, and 3 have been dispatched. Dad finally bought a Havahart trap to catch them. They promptly figured out how to lift up the trap and get the bait. It’s a constant battle.

In other news, Mom is in the process of staining the armoire, which is a long hard slog. Our kitchen is stain central, and the fumes are going to everybody’s heads.

Last weekend Mom took me to see Mamma Mia, which is a musical based on the songs of ABBA. Mom and Dad went to see it for their anniversary this year, and she liked it so much she took me too. It’s actually a really cute movie. Plus, it has Meryl Streep, and Peirce Brosnan, and Colin Firth* and Julie Walters, so how can you NOT see it? Dad got Mom the soundtrack, so now we are all listening to ABBA nonstop. Mom has even decreed that it’s unamerican not to like ABBA.Take a chance on meeeee….

I have gotten Facebook and become addicted.

I have also started school. Grr. BUT, hopefully I will be able to take December off the way I did last year! A&P is going super so far, and so is Latin. Math is just really really annoying, especially today’s lesson where all Dr. Shorman is was yak on and on about the area of transversal laterals or something. Brit Lit is OK, but Sonlight, so involved. I’m done with Beowulf and onto Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I just started Logic, and I haven’t begun French yet, although I have a new resolution to work harder at it after being to Taize. It comes easily to me but I haven’t been studying it the way I should. Orchestra and whatever band I end up with starts next week.

More on Taize tomorrow.

Um, that’s all the news from here I guess…boring boring end of summer…

*Incidentally, he has a really high voice. Like in Manly Men, the first verse, only actually very true.

Oyak

Every day after evening prayers, there is a party called Oyak.

Actually, Oyak is the name of a building outside Taize, where they sell useful items such as snacks and toothbrushes, and soda which is about 10 times better than ours plus it comes in more attractive bottles. No one knows why it’s called Oyak but it is, (actually OYAK is the abbreviation for the armed forces pension fund in Turkey but…) and it makes for great conversational material such as, “Will I see you at OYAK tonight?” or “Want to go to OYAK now?”. Around the building there are some tables and benches, and behind the building there’s a field where Europeans whip our tails at soccer. There’s also some tents back there, but open tents, not the kind you sleep in. And every night after worship was done everyone would gather and there was music and dancing and cheap food and every so often you would run into someone who was either drunk or stoned and giggling uncontrollably.

Then there were the people who got drunk and sang “La Marsillaise” until 4am, but we won’t go into that now. These European people like THE WORST of our music. (yeah, I know that the Marsilliaise is French, I’m just seguing…) As far as I could tell the guitar players knew about 16 songs and they just kept playing them over and over and over.

At any given moment during the evening if you went down to Oyak you would be sure to find:

• Clapping games. There were a ton of clapping games, and it’s a great way to bond, I suppose. The chants to them were in all different languages, but the basic clapping stuff was the same. I must have learned 6 different ones that week. And one of the things about Taize is, no one is a stranger. You can randomly introduce yourself to people and randomly join in games with people from Lithuania or Poland or wherever. The bishop is standing there watching you teach German people the Chicken Dance. It was great.
• Other games. By this I mean ZipZap (which I am really really pathetic at, by the way) or the game where you go, “Hyah!” and make a slicing motion with your arms, or the Italian version of Twister, which interestingly enough one girl had to play with a guy who was about to be ordained as a Jesuit priest. That got kind of awkward.
• People over in the corner smoking something that was not cigarettes.
• Four or five different groups of people doing various songs or chanting. Everyone centered around the musicians, clapping, and if you were close you got a bench to sit or stand on. Around the periphery of the crowd would be groups or people dancing.
• Crazy American people obsessing over the Fanta bottles. Their soda is better than ours.
• Some guys with guitars singing Country Roads Take Me Home, among other songs. They also LOVED Hit The Road Jack and Land of 1000 Dances, probably because they require no lyrical memorization at all, the Backstreet Boys, and Lemon Tree, but not the version you’re thinking of, the one by Fool’s Garden that starts, “I’m sitting here in the boring room…”. They all knew all the lyrics to everything, too. People from Siberia knew more popular American music than I did.

I think that to understand Oyak you really have to be there, plus I’m tired, so to close here’s a video of Oyak: centering on people who don’t know each other, or if they do they met two days ago singing and dancing together, which is a pretty awesome experience.

At least until you got a headache from hearing Zombie for the twelfth time and went back to the tent to take aspirin.

 

For MORE OF THE OYAK EXPERIENCE visit youtube and type “taize oyak” into the search box.

 

This was taken while I was there so I might even be in the background somewhere…but I didn’t look closely enough to tell.

Au Contraire, Installment 4- or is it 5?

Anyway….

 

I’ve mentioned before that Ben enjoys making up song lyrics. (Official motto of Ben: Why breathe when you can sing?) We also play a game wherein I give him the first line of a song, usually a hymn, and he makes up the rest of the verse. It gets pretty ridiculous.

Lately “Lord of The Dance” has been on my mind (read: repeating on an endless loop in my brain) because we’ve been playing it a lot in orchestra and the choir did it for an anthem this morning, not to mention that I also watched the Irish-step-dancing, music-video, Michael-Flatley, very-tight-leather-clothing Lord of the Dance movie last night. The refrain goes,

Dance, dance, wherever you may be

For I am the Lord of the Dance says he

And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be

And I’ll lead you all in the dance says he

I know all five verses of this song. Don’t ask me how, I didn’t purposely memorize them.

Ben has discovered that “dance” conveniently rhymes with “pants” and “plants” and “trance”. See following:

Pants, pants, I somehow lost my pants,

I seem to have lost the pants of me,

They’re really really gone and I don’t know where,

Next thing I know I’ve lost my hair

and:

Trance, trance, I am in a trance,

I’m in a trance and I lost my pants

I don’t know what I am going to do,

Maybe I will just say “moo”.