Merry Christmas 2025!

Christmas lights through the front door. Christmas Day, 2025.

“Oh my! I don’t usually have more than one, but it is the holidays….” [cue hysterical laughter]

Merry Christmas, y’all! I wish you all the meaning of the day. For the Catholics, and the similarly aligned, we look forward to the 12 Days of Christmas beginning today. To our fellow Christians, we celebrate fraternally, the incarnation of God, the Creator of the Universe. To the rest of America and those who choose to throw in with us, this represents a time vaguely associated with the Solstice that causes the Northern Hemisphere to contemplate the brightening of days, the eventual advent of spring, and a time where we think about love of our fellow humans, the idea we may achieve peace on Earth, and that individuals will find the emotional connection we all seek. (I’m sorry, Southern Hemisphere. I haven’t got anything for you on this one. The days will grow shorter. The warmth will fade away. And in your coldest times you will not have the bright spot of Christmas to look forward to. I’m feeling your pain.)

Our personal Christmas has been especially meaningful to me. My best friend in the choir, a bass like me, died 18 days ago. An ordained priest who left the clergy to pursue a ‘worldly life’, he never stopped being what priests aspire to be (if they are true priests): the lowly shepherds who gather the sheep who stray and return them to the fold. I suppose he never will be venerated, beatified, or sanctified, but he established a spiritual North Star for me, and his death so close to Christmas has rocked me emotionally and spiritually. That I say this day’s mass proved especially moving to me makes me think that the last time I felt this way occurred in 2019 exactly two months after my mother died (and I retired). It’s funny how we imbue meaning into the same annual ritual liturgy.

I approach my faith through music and musical ministry. Thus, the Midnight Mass this year meant I dwelt in the choir loft yet again despite thinking, “How much longer can I stay up until 2 or 3 a.m.?” I reference my comment to my recently departed friend from the bass section who last year at 84 found it a requirement to be in the loft on Christmas Eve, preparing for the first hour of the birth of Jesus. He could not stand for more than 10-15 minutes. He exerted himself to climb the steps to the top riser where the basses reside. Contrary to offering complaint, he climbed with a smile on his face. I kept thinking about him, about my slight musical retreat from participating in what my vocal gift allows me to do, and about how this night above most others enriches the spiritual experience for those who attend but Christmas and Easter.

We presented 45 minutes of music from a brass quintet (plus tympani), two organists using our CB Fisk Opus 147 pipe organ, and the two dozen voices of our choir. I invite you to follow that link to the page describing the organ. It inferentially mentions our cathedral space which remains one of the largest Roman Catholic cathedrals in America, providing space for about 2,000 worshippers.

Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral, Raleigh, NC, preparing for Midnight Mass 2025. Two transepts exist to both sides of the altar area. The choir loft, foreground, shows the camera which will transmit a YouTube livestream, the seats and stands for the brass quintet, and is taken from the top riser where the basses sit. Christmas Day 2025.

Not unusually at Christmas, parishioners packed our cathedral.

Here’s a not-unusual detail for folks like me:

Spend Christmas Eve morning planning the logistics for the next 48 hours.
Align meal times with reality
Take a nap for 1-2 hours sometime during the 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. timeframe
Shower a second time…perform necessary personal grooming functions
Continue day to its normal concluding time (for seniors), but have dinner just a bit later
About the time one would prepare for bed, prepare to go to church instead
Get to church at 10:45 p.m.
Participate in pre-mass musical program from 11:15-midnight
Support the mass with musical ministray/leadership
When mass ends at 1:30 a.m., engage in social chat, drive home
Arriving home about 2 a.m. or later, and realizing you are far too jazzed to go to sleep, crack a bottle of “Christmas cheer” and calm in the alcoholic-existentialist manner until approximately 3:30 a.m.
Go to bed
Wake on Christmas Day about 8:30-9:00 a.m. Absolutely beat, and with no more than 6.5 hours’ sleep (usually more like 5.0), stumble through a few hours before saying, “Screw it, I’m having a beer, dear.”

There you have it: a raw, day-after download of what this (and many other) Christmas has meant to me. I wish you and yours the merriest of the day. Here on the east coast of the United States, about eight hours remain on Christmas Day. I hope however many you have (or had), they will be/were meaningful.

three coins

perhaps a three-week hiatus demands a post about Three

Every morning after I’ve got pants and shoes on, I grab “stuff for my pockets” which varies depending on whether I anticipate going out and needing a wallet. Sometimes I don’t think I’ll need American coinage either, but I always grab a lip balm stick and three coins:

Top to bottom: Eisenhower dollar, Mary Queen of the Universe, and a guardian angel coin. Oblique angle, right, shows the etching better. December 2025.

This ritual, this grabbing of physical reminders, has existed from before the morning prayer time I started recently. Because I am who I am, I consider the smallest coin first. For a period of time when people held postal mail in higher regard than now, and the Internet hadn’t become the ubiquitous realm where we encounter one another, I received a regular marketing mailer from some religious publishing house. Or maybe it was a charity looking for donors. Regardless, every mailer had affixed to its mail-in card a cheap metal coin with an angel embossed on it. “This is your Guardian Angel! Take this gift as a token of our appreciation!” the card said. And one day when yet another of these things showed up, I did. I don’t pretend to understand the exact nature of a guardian angel, but I can say with certainty there have been many times when something bad should have happened to me or when I for some reason refrained from saying something incredibly stupid, and I think a higher power might have influenced things. The coin reminds me there are forces greater than me at play in the universe, and I would do well to give them a few seconds each day to stop and appreciate them.

I picked up the middle coin in February 2013 when we visited Kissimmee, FL, spur-of-the-moment. I had a suddenly empty work calendar in my new line as contract-professional-for-hire, and Florida promised to be warmer than Raleigh. In most ways that count, it remains one of the two best times I’ve had in my half dozen or so visits. Due to the sudden nature of it, I planned little. We just schlepped around and on our final day discovered The Basilica of the National Shrine of Mary, Queen of the Universe:

Interior, shrine to Mary, Queen of the Universe. Kissimmee, FL. February 2013.

Moved, I sought a small reminder of my experience there; hence the coin. In Roman Catholicism, the Marian tradition provides an important link for humans with God. As Mother of the Son of Man, God Incarnate, Mary becomes our symbolic mother just as Jesus is our brother. Thus our reverence for our mother, just as we revere our earthly mothers (hopefully). The coin reminds me of this link, of the powerful Family of God of which I am a wayward son, and of my brother-and-God, Jesus. Powerful stuff…and all in a few seconds!

My final coin (because it’s biggest) reminds of something far less religious, but no less meaningful. My father had an eclectic collection of coins he kept in a small metal box shaped and decorated as a 1940’s suitcase complete with travel stickers on it. He popped the occasional coin into it which he thought would be “worth something someday” or just out of curiosity. The U.S. Mint first struck an Eisenhower dollar in 1971 which likely explains why my father set this one aside. It also happened to be the first dollar coin minted since 1935. To me, however, it stands in for my father. I grab that coin and think about the oddity of putting 15-20 coins in a little kid’s bank and then doing nothing with it: he never took them out and looked at them, he never spoke about them, nothing. Only when he allowed my brother and me to dig around in his chest of drawers would we get to see what this little metal box held. In a larger sense, I see that profile of a bald president and think about my father in his final 20 years. I say a little prayer that he has found peace in the afterlife, a peace which eluded him here.

These few seconds…the little things we do which ground us.

Goodbye, Christmas

Tail end of Christmastide, 2023. January 2024.

Western Catholics have lost touch with the historical End of Christmas. Today, February 2nd, is that day, the 40th Day of Christmas (counting Christmas day as “1”). Christmastide, i.e., The Twelve Days of Christmas culminates at Epiphany; the period of time between Epiphany Sunday and the Presentation of the Lord (at the Temple) culminates at Candlemas (in the Western church). Traditionally some cultures leave Christmas decorations up through this day. As I may have stated previously, leaving Christmas decorations up past this day carries very bad luck so let’s not tempt that, okay?

I lean into this gradual easing into Ordinary Time. Though we’ve marked the 2nd and 3rd Sundays of Ordinary Time–we forget that usually this day falls midweek and doesn’t take precedence over a Sunday–we also tarry with the Christmas spirit through this date. I like that Jesus at 12 years of age stands at the threshold of adulthood. Time to put away the pleasantries of our Christmas-childhood and enter the reality of our calling.

Epiphany 2024

Boy, do I miss the Musical Heritage Society.

A very happy Epiphany to y’all. I’ll refer you to many other sources online which will explain all the nuances of the day–suffice to say it generally is associated with the Three Wise Men/Three Kings who visited the Christ Child a bit after his birth. Think gold, frankincense, and myrrh. For me it means I listen to Amahl and the Night Visitors, a one-act opera by Gian Carlo Menotti. In it, Amahl is a young boy, lame, who no longer watches sheep because his mother and he are so poor that she has sold the sheep to buy food. There is no father. They are visited by the three wise men who are on their way to Bethlehem. Amahl’s mother is unable to withstand temptation with all that gold, and she takes a piece whereupon she is caught. All is quickly forgiven, Amahl experiences a miracle healing, and he receives his mother’s permission to accompany the three kings on the rest of their journey so that he can pay homage to Jesus (and presumably give thanks for being healed).

This opera amazes me, not because of its performance (which I love) but because in 1951 NBC commissioned it, by the “director of NBC’s new opera programming” no less! Imagine that. Today reality TV masquerades as intentional, thoughtful programming; 70 years ago, NBC not only telecast an opera but commissioned it. I have listened to this on or around Epiphany every year for more than 30 years after I purchased it from the Musical Heritage Society in the late 80’s. My version is the 1986 London production which occurred under Menotti’s supervision, and which I digitized during the Great Musical Digitization Project I performed on my music from 2006-2014. (Eight years? In my defense there was a lot of music, and I kept buying more. In fact, I have a few hundred recordings which never made it, mostly jazz and classical.) Imagine my distress when I couldn’t locate this file on my computer today. Something must have happened–files do corrupt for various reasons–and I deleted it? I had to ‘make do’ with the version I found on Tidal which featured the original cast of the NBC telecast shown on Christmas Eve in 1951. I couldn’t determine if it was the actual broadcast or just “featured” those performers. If you go looking for it, the director of this recording was Thomas Schippers. It was very good, but not as good as the one I purchased in 1987 or 1988 from MHS. The latter has clearer vocals which make the words easier to understand. In my opinion, it also features a bit more drama in the performances.

This is an opera for children because it tries to recapture my own childhood. You see, when I was a child I lived in Italy, and in Italy we have no Santa Claus. I suppose that Santa Claus is much too busy with American children to be able to handle Italian children as well. Our gifts were brought to us by the Three Kings, instead.

I actually never met the Three Kings—it didn’t matter how hard my little brother and I tried to keep awake at night to catch a glimpse of the Three Royal Visitors, we would always fall asleep just before they arrived. But I do remember hearing them. I remember the weird cadence of their song in the dark distance; I remember the brittle sound of the camel’s hooves crushing the frozen snow; and I remember the mysterious tinkling of their silver bridles.
Gian-Carlo Menotti, from the liner notes to the original cast recording (Wikipedia)

I miss MHS. It would usually take obscure or under-appreciated (but very decent) recordings, add its own liner notes, and press them. In addition to Amahl and the Night Visitors I purchased many wonderful albums of Christmas music alone: A Tapestry of Carols by Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band, listed first because it is my absolute favorite Christmas album; Christmas Carols by the Scottish National Orchestra, rated by several critics as one of the best Christmas albums ever; Christmas Now Is Drawing Nigh by Sneaks Noyse, an attempt to recreate what the carols sounded like centuries ago; Carols from New College by the Choir of New College, Oxford; Merry Christmas by the Vienna Boys Choir; and A Festival of Christmas which appears to be a combination of two commercial albums, one by the Huddersfield Choral Society and one by The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir.

And so we bid goodbye to Christmastide and Epiphany. In a moment, I shall pray for all those who enter our house and chalk that blessing on the lintel of our front door. I’m not worried about getting the decorations down before sundown: they will start to come down tomorrow. And we will segue into Ordinary Time, an odd naming for the time which is neither Lent/Easter- or Advent/Christmas-oriented. Bless you all who come through the virtual doorway to this blog.

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas…

Ah, here we are–Twelfth Night! The crazy Americans, as represented by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), have screwed up the whole 12 days of Christmas thing because Twelfth Night also is called Epiphany Eve. Tomorrow is Epiphany…except in the United States because hey, it’s more convenient to celebrate it on a Sunday and there’s a Sunday the day after so…. They do this every year. Last year Epiphany was on January 8th. In 2022 it was on January 2nd, an exceedingly horrible choice because we were just 8 or 9 days into Christmastide when it occurred. It seems to me–though no one consults me in these matters–that if one wants to insist on celebrating Advent (not Christmas) in the leadup to December 25th, then one ought to celebrate Epiphany on its appropriate day, January 6th, regardless of the day of the week. It’s important because of the Twelve Days of Christmas, i.e., Christmastide. It shortchanges Christmas to stick with the full leadup to it (Advent) only to cut more than half a week off of it for convenience’s sake. It’s not like the church doesn’t celebrate certain dates no matter where they fall: Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary; Immaculate Conception of the BVM; Ash Wednesday. Our parish just celebrated our feast day, The Most Holy Name of Jesus, on Wednesday–where it belongs.

According to the USCCB, tomorrow is a “Christmas Weekday”. Not in Twelvetide, unless you’re Orthodox. Maybe they’re just giving back one of the days stolen in previous years?

Twelfth Night has various traditions including eating king cake, chalking the door (with a set of religious symbols intended to bless all who enter during the year–see photo below), singing carols, and of course, in some countries, going to church. It’s been considered unlucky to leave Christmas decorations up past Twelfth Night, but I tend to favor Epiphany for this. I base this on the idea that Epiphany celebrates when the three kings, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, visited the Christ Child who still resided in a manger in Bethlehem (according to our tradition). Still, if I adhere to the superstition, not removing the decorations by sundown tomorrow (or tonight if we’re going to strictly observe Jan 6th as Epiphany) means we have to leave them up until Candlemas which occurs on Feb 2nd. That would be overmuch, don’t you think?

We chalked the doors at the start of 2020. In our local tradition, the initials for three kings was placed in the middle of the year. As you can see, we’ve not been real good at keeping up the tradition. January 2020.

If you’ve followed all of these entries, you have my sympathy. After Epiphany I will return to more poetry, essays, and photography.

On the First Day of Christmas…

…this blog gave to me…a discourse meant to bore me…

[a pastiche of thoughts as Christmas begins]

NC Chinese Lantern Festival 2023. December 2023.

Yes, we’re into the Twelve Days of Christmas. Generally Twelvetide runs December 25th through the very end of January 5th, Epiphany beginning on January 6th. (This information primarily comes from Wikipedia.) The Council of Tours created it in 567 AD–and yes, I’m using AD not CE on purpose. For various reasons some Eastern churches celebrate the twelve days starting with the day after Christmas.

Our world generally has forgotten the distinction of seasons, of singular dates. Seasons orient around only the salient events. We don’t appreciate the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas–hell, between Halloween and Christmas–as anything but a lead-up to Christmas Day. I don’t think you have to be a Christian to acknowledge that there just might be something happening between those two dates nearly 60 days apart (besides Thanksgiving). As a Christian, it mystifies me when I try to figure out what Christmas means to the non-religious or non-spiritual person. It seems an inchoate, indefinite span of peace-love-dove (and don’t forget the shopping), marked primarily with traditions whose meanings have been lost to time. Ah, well. This old guy still enjoys pausing to remember all the examples of saints on All Saints Day and all the dearly departed on All Souls. I like to build up to Thanksgiving the way we used to, focusing on the stories (true or not) about how the day’s traditions came into being. I spend the days immediately after Thanksgiving focused on Advent, leaning into the promises of Christmas rather than a bustling, have-I-got-everything-done race to the 25th. This actually handicaps me because I tend to not get things done such as preparing the Christmas newsletter, setting up decorations outdoors, or getting the tree up. On the other hand, I don’t race to do so. Christmas starts on the 25th, and we are in celebration mode now for 12 days. The tree stays up until January 6th; the decorations too.

Christmas Day started at midnight with mass (see here). Two sleep-deprived adults, who retired at 3:30 a.m. and woke about 5.5 hours later, reached for adult beverages sooner than is rational. Fine brews, expense-be-damned, dominated the day: Duvel’s namesake offering; Chimay’s Grand Reserve (the blue label), inexplicably available from Costco every year about this time; N’ice Chouffe from Brasserie D’Achouffe; and Oakspire from New Belgium, a deep amber ale somewhat like a Scottish one, aged in bourbon barrels from Four Roses Distillery. My wife shies away from the dark end of the beer scale; when I shifted to the Oakspire, she went with Sierra Nevada’s Celebration Ale, which has evolved over the past 20 years into a red IPA. If you know anything about these beers, you’ll realize we didn’t have a lot of cares as we approached our festive but subdued meal. I offered up a standard ‘guy meal’ of wedge salad with a homemade blue cheese dressing, thin slices from a 3-inch thick ribeye (seared and minimally roasted), baked russets, and broccolini with pecan butter. (No we don’t do dessert. It’s just a thing.)

My wife and I quit exchanging presents about five years ago. We’ve found Christmas posseses a peculiar dynamic when you don’t have children. You’ve never built up that tradition of mesmerizing the children on Christmas Day. You’ve never sacrificed all year long for those children, welcoming a bit of liberal spending to get a few things you’ve wanted throughout that year. We finally acknowledged an obvious truth: we get what we want when we want it. (Example: my wife accidentally soaked her tablet on December 17th. We replaced it with a purchase three days later, and she set the new one up less than a week after she drowned the previous one. Retired people understand the concept of cash flow.) Christmas gifts are a superfluous thing, coals to Newcastle. Instead we work on intangibles such as vacation plans, entertainment, planning our elevated meals for Twelvetide, and…each other.

That’s where things stand on Boxing Day. We’re looking forward to a near-fortnight of special meals peppering our evening meal plans. Lurking like aspiring actors in the casting office: stuffed quail; a NYD menu of pork, collards, and black-eyed peas with a side of cornbread; a re-run of the Sicilian Swordfish Stew from Christmas Eve; and perhaps some holiday tamales. Okay, no, I’m not going to the effort of tamales, but enchiladas doesn’t sound half bad.

Merry Christmas, y’all!

Holiday Stress Daily Soundtrack

Technically today’s soundtrack started with mass this morning and our choir’s rendition of “God Omnipotent Reigneth” written by Charles Wood. The performance occurs at 1:07:25 in the cathedral’s weekly YouTube broadcast . I wish the microphones could pick up the resonance provided by one of the largest cathedral spaces in the United States. Perhaps search out an alternate performance on your streaming platform of choice.

Today’s soundtrack continues with “Goof Balls” by Keller & The Keels, which perfectly describes how I feel when I volunteer for an extra time-sucking task on top of all the Christmas stuff on top of all the daily things I can’t seem to get done! (Hence my image up top of a years-old meme.)

That put me in the mood and I’m going to listen to Keller & The Keels’ album Grass from 2006 which leads off with “Goof Balls”. It’s much clearer on the studio cut. After that who knows? Oh wait–it just hit me. Teenage Depression by Eddie & The Hot Rods. It has just the right combo of nihilism, resignation, and the feeling of being strapped to the cowcatcher of a train. Suits me to a tee.

As Herman Hesse said when playing Dr. Johnny Fever on WKRP in Cincinnati, “The doctor over-medicated last night, babies.” (or something like that) I feel the need of some medication coming on….

Tag: Catholicism