Sufjan Stevens, Put the Lights on the Tree
Put the lights on the tree
(Put them on the tree)
Put the ribbon on the wreath
(Put it on the wreath)
Call your grandma on the phone
(Call her on the phone)
If she’s living all alone
(If she’s all alone)
Tell her Jesus Christ is here
(Tell her He is here)
Tell her she has none to fear
(There is none to fear)
If she’s crying on the phone
(Crying on the phone)
Tell her you are coming home
(You are coming home)
WK
This entry was written by , posted on December 24, 2008 at 12:41 am, filed under Music and tagged Advent, Christmas. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Rudy, by the Be Good Tanyas:
Rudy lives on the borderline
Between civilisation and basic survival
The summertime treats him fairly well
But the wintertime is a bitter cold rival
It’s wintertime now in Georgetown
And the streets come alive with the Christmas lights
And Rudy sleeps on the warm air grate
With a newspaper blanket
On December nights.
Deck the halls,
Rudolph the red-nosed wino knows it’s Christmas time
Jingle bells and Christmas shoppers dashing through the snow
God bless ye merry gentleman
Who have found it in your hearts to flip Rudy a thin
Cuz I’ll be home for Christmas
But this man has no place to go.
Christmas has no meaning at all?
These people of greed and incredible waste
Who seek the deeper meaning in a shopping mall
With a yuletide spirit of impatience and hate
Rudy is a patient man
Who tries to see the beauty in everything
Is not a very demanding soul
Whose only wish is to live until the spring
Nobody knows the reasons why
Things turn out the way they do
And there ain’t no one to tell you the reasons why there’s fortunate folks like me and you
Rudy must have people somewhere who wonder what became of a man
And Rudy must wonder the same damn thing
As the crowd passes by and he sticks out his hand.
Deck the halls,
Rudolph the red-nosed wino knows it’s Christmas time
Jingle bells and Christmas shoppers dashing through the snow
God bless ye merry gentleman
Who have found it in your hearts to flip Rudy a thin
Cuz I’ll be home for Christmas
But this man has no place to go.
Rudy died on the borderline
Of a civilized world on Christmas Eve
And the shoppers shopped and the temperatures dropped
On a man whose absence won’t be greived
Peace on the soul of the cop who found him
In a booth with his hand frozen to a telephone
Y’know, I think I know who he had on the line
And Rudy won’t spend this Christmas alone.
Deck the halls,
Rudolph the red-nosed wino knows it’s Christmas time
Jingle bells and Christmas shoppers dashing through the snow
God bless ye merry gentleman
Who have found it in your hearts to flip Rudy a thin
And I’ll be home for Christmas
But this year Rudy gets to go
And I’ll be home for Christmas
But this year Rudy gets to go
WK
This entry was written by , posted on December 23, 2008 at 9:08 am, filed under Music and tagged Advent, Christmas, Homelessness. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
In an ongoing effort to avoid work that would actually go towards, say, a B.A. in Religious Studies, I’m going to start my Advent 08 talks with one that comes up amongst the newly married, like myself – The need for compromise and the joining of two traditions into a new tradition.
As Andy Crouch puts it, the family is the primary cultural unit. Why did I add that? It’s because (almost) everything you will attribute to Christmas, how you’ll do Christmas, who you’ll spend Christmas with, and when you start celebrating Christmas comes from (or comes as a reaction to) your family. Now that I am happily and newly married, this means that two cultures are coming together with differing views of how to do Christmas/Advent.
This leads right into a little confession: I started Christmas celebrations a week early. Christine decided that last week was really the best time to set up the tree, and since I didn’t want to leave her to do it herself/not take part in what I think is integral to the season (setting up), I broke my own ‘Not-until-Advent’ rule. These things happen, and I’m sure I’ll have to give on other things as well.
Luckily, we argued about Christmas last year. Instead of trying to synthesize our entire two traditions into a composite tradition interval, like many of my friends have done over the years, we will be attempting to create our own traditions for Christmas. This is both exciting and scary, since it is a big departure for both Christine and I, though I did spend Christmas in her tradition and with her family last year, so I may be slightly more prepared for the culture-change.
Most of all, I’m trying to keep everything in perspective. Throughout this season, I’ll be dropping lots of song lyrics, since song is integral to this season. The song that has, and will always, help keep me in perspective, is First Christmas, by Stan Rogers:
This day a year ago, he was rolling in the snow
With a younger brother in his father’s yard
Christmas break, a time for touching home,
the heart of all he’d known
And leaving was so hard
Three thousand miles away,
now he’s working Christmas Day
Making double time for the minding of the store
Well he always said, he’d make it on his own
He’s spending Christmas Eve alone
First Christmas away from home
She’s standing by the train station,
pan-handling for change
Four more dollars buys a decent meal and a room
Looks like the Sally Ann place after all,
in a crowded sleeping hall
That echoes like a tomb
But it’s warm and clean and free,
and there are worse places to be
At least it means no beating from her Dad
And if she cries because it’s Christmas Day
She hopes that it won’t show
First Christmas away from home
In the apartment stands a tree,
and it looks so small and bare
Not like it was meant to be,
Golden angel on the top
It’s not that same old silver star,
you wanted for your own
First Christmas away from home
In the morning, they get prayers,
then it’s crafts and tea downstairs
Then another meal back in his little room
Hoping maybe that “the boys”
will think to phone before the day is gone
Well, it’s best they do it soon
When the “old girl” passed away,
he fell apart more every day
Each had always kept the other pretty well
But the kids all said the nursing home was best
Cause he couldn’t live alone
First Christmas away from home
In the common room they’ve got the biggest tree
And it’s huge and cold and lifeless
Not like it ought to be,
and the lit-up flashing Santa Claus on top
It’s not that same old silver star,
you once made for your own
First Christmas away from home
If it is your first Christmas away from home, I pray you find peace in your new traditions.
WK
This entry was written by , posted on December 2, 2008 at 12:47 am, filed under Culture and tagged Advent, Christmas, Culture, Family. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
I really love Christmas. Unlike many of my Christmas-loving friends, however, I try to be really strict on when I start decorating/celebrating – I like to start with Advent, the first event of the Church’s liturgical Calendar.
Liturgical calendar?
We have one of those?
For those of us outside of the mainline churches (which is most of you who read this), the liturgical calendar is the ordering of the holidays, big and small, important to the Church that happen throughout the year. It starts in December with Advent. The Church starts then, and as a (albeit small) measure of discipline, I’m not starting to celebrate or blog about it til then. But, like in years of steady-blogging past, I will be commenting on Christmas steadily throughout the season.
As a preview, here’s something I picked up off of Jeff Smyth’s blog, Paradox of Living, about something I seriously think about every year:
This entry was written by , posted on November 17, 2008 at 6:38 pm, filed under Activism, Christianity and tagged Advent, Christmas, Conspiracy, Liturgy. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.