Your Winter Solstice Argh Tradition

~ Jenny

Thanksgiving is over, let’s all sing. Happy Holidays, Argh People!

(Yes, I know I was just bitching about Christmas music, but we do this every year.  Also, it’s THE DRIFTERS.  Do not complain about the Drifters.  Ever.)

22 thoughts on “Your Winter Solstice Argh Tradition”

  3. OK. For this I’ll reframe my rule: the run-up to Christmas starts now (and not on 1 December). Thanks: I always love this.

    1. The rule at our house was always the tree went up after Thanksgiving and came down on New Year’s Day.
      My trees are not yet up, but they will be. I didn’t put them up last year and it was a cold holiday without them.

      1. We always put our tree up on my mother’s birthday (12/23) and took it down New Year’s Day. Now, I live in a very small house and don’t have room for a full tree so I put my small, artificial tree up shortly after Thanksgiving Day and take it down Jan 1st.

    2. I’ve had a note in my calendar for years and years that December 1 is St Cholestra’s day (patroness of cookies). No idea where it came from . . . .

    3. The rule at our house is the Christmas tree goes up the day before Christmas and comes down on Epiphany, January 6. However, in later years due to the fact the the tree lots close the weekend before Christmas, that’s usually when we get our tree and put it up.

      However, the 4 foot wide wreath we put in our front window goes in earlier because I have to build it, and my husband has to put the lights on it and anchor it to the front of the window, then I have to decorate it once it’s in place. And everyone else on the street puts their decorations out by early December at the latest and we look like grinches if we wait until just before Christmas.

      One of our neighbors hires some firm that comes in and puts lights along their eaves, all perfectly spaced and then they come back and take them down after New Year. I am consumed with envy.

      1. I have two bay windows that are falling off the front of the house, and I put a three foot tree in each one, and smaller trees on each side of the front door with lights. That’s it. I’m not messing with eaves.

  6. I always enjoy the day you put this up, it gives me a happy start to the day. I had No idea that Black Friday was here in B. C. (Canada) and my husband, who Hates to shop decided he needed a new razor. We are recovering slowly as we are senior seniors! I’ll have to watch the song again!

  8. Oh, if we’re sharing holiday audio, everyone must hear this: Robin Williams reading ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas
    https://youtu.be/INzqLES5a3I

    It’s been one of my favorite things to listen to during the holidays since I happened to buy the Boston Pops album in college.

  9. Having worked in retail for several years, I developed an intense dislike of Christmas music. When I was forced to listen to it for 9-10 hours a day, every day of the week for at least 2 months (and sometimes more, depending on when the stores start playing it) for the 12 years I worked retail, I rapidly tired of it. To this day (15 years later) I still don’t like most Christmas music. Fortunately, there are a few classic songs that didn’t get overplayed, so I can still hear them without cringing or changing the station. And I avoid most malls and shopping centers until Christmas is over.

    I do, however, like the video you posted and will happily play it more than once. I also enjoyed the Robin Williams version of The Night Before Christmas!

    Lest I be misunderstood, I do like Christmas, as long as it’s not shoved down my throat, and happily exchange gifts with loved ones.

    1. My husband also worked retail for too many years and will not listen to most popular xmas music. I have a special mix of non-standard stuff just for him. There are still new songs being created, and sometimes they’re good. (You might like some of Straight No Chaser’s original stuff. I especially enjoy “Who Spiked the Eggnog” and “The Christmas Can-Can”, which has the line, “I’ve heard this song twenty times and it’s only Halloween”)

  10. I love this version of white christmas. The only thing I regularly like to listen to at Christmas is Handel’s “Messiah” which I go to every year. My other regular Christmas music is Joan Baez Christmas Album, Elvis’ Blue Christmas and Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant (first Christmas present I bought for my husband and it was when it was still largely underground).

    My husband also likes us to play Bing Crosby’s White Christmas because his aunts’ played it every Christmas and his family always got up Christmas morning loaded the presents into the car and drove 260 miles to spend Christmas with his mother’s unmarried older sisters. They generally got there in time for dinner (this was back in the 50’s). And being good Americans they always listened to Bing Crosby.

    Also his mother liked swing but I cannot recall any of the albums. Back in the 30’s his mom had a career as a nurse and talked about going to jazz clubs in Pioneer Square in Seattle and hearing Cab Calloway live and how cocaine was legal and available, not that SHE used any – I wonder if that is like mom’s of our generation telling their children they did not smoke pot and spent the 60’s and 70’s in the college library.

    1. Not all of us. Mollie knows we smoked pot and she’s not impressed. And I actually did spend a lot of time in library. And protesting. The sixties and seventies were an exciting time to go to college.

      1. When protester’s occupied the ROTC building which was where most of my archaeology classes were, I was down in the basement working on pot shards and did not know until I got home that evening. But I did go to a lot of silent protests where almost invariably one of my contacts would pop out and I would spend a lot of time on my hands and knees looking for it. I was not a real ornament to the protest movement.

        1. The night after Kent State, a lot of the students came to our campus, and we had a candlelit march that night, our students, the townspeople, the Kent State people,and the idiot Ohio governor sent in the National Guard in riot gear. Scariest thing in my nineteen-year-old life, but that was also the moment that I rejected my dad’s “The government is always right,” and became a Democrat. Decades ago, and it’s still one of the events that had the most impact on my life, right up there with Mollie’s birth. It’s so weird to think that’s ancient history; it was yesterday for me, and I still remember that sense of dislocation, the sure knowledge that everything was different, that I would never be the same, that my country would never be the same.

          Also, I still don’t like parfaits.

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