I have been a person who waited until the very end to cut and put up the Christmas tree. It echoed not my own childhood (though we were late-ish until my mother remarried), but my mother's and grandmother's Swedish traditions, where the tree was decorated by the adults Christmas Eve and the children saw it for the first time in the morning. This makes more sense when you are using real candles and the tree is only up for a week. Which even we didn't do, but my grandmother remembered. You can read about it in my Aunt Jennie's book The Golden Name Day, recently reissued with terrible illustrations, and notable for the fact that such details as houses burning down or girls' hair catching fire for Luciadag* were studiously unmentioned.
We had a friend who was a stickler (a good Episcopalian at the time) for only having Advent music before Christmas and Carols only sung after midnight Christmas Eve. She has gotten over that, but when we were Lutherans we trended in that direction somewhat. But I quickly settled for grousing about Winter Songs and Santa Songs mixed into the religious holiday, sometimes smuggled.
So let's give thanks to the Lord above,'cause Santa Claus is coming tonight.
It got a little silly. Tracy and I would sing Christmas Carols in July or October, but shut down after Hallowe'en until Thanksgiving Night. Then we would go full bore until Epiphany, when everyone else was buying Valentine's candy.
A young friend, sort of a stepson, posted this on Facebook yesterday. He is a musician, and he's got a solid point here.
People don't sing "We gather Together" in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, do they? Not even the ones who know all the verses by heart.
*Tell your side of the story if you want, bsking.
2 comments:
"Let Thy congregation/Escape tribulation" is like praying that the Cubs win the Ashes!
But it rhymes and is multisyllabic, which was important in that era, when people wanted to show off that they could read.
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