Every year I try to find holiday music that is not Santa rocking around the Xmas tree, Chestnuts roasting, or Dreidl Dreidl Dreidl.

Noel Nouvelet is a favorite, but it's difficult to find an arrangement online that has all the polyphonic, and female and male voices blended ( Read more... )

If you don't mind heartwarming holiday ads, these German commercials via Cora Buhlert are tiny stories, with different feels to them. Most have little dialogue, and one has subtitles, so I think anyone could follow.

The Edeka one I'd already heard about a couple times--it has some bite to it.

I was listening to some Ernst Bloch while on the way back from the grocery store (and there was rain! A whole two minutes of it! And there I was having forgotten how this car turns on its wipers), and realized I had not wished a happy Chanukah to my friends who celebrate ( Read more... )

This amazing story of team effort to save lives is cast as a Christmas post, but really, it could as easily have gone up last week during Chanukah, or over the weekend to celebrate the return of the sun, or in acknowledgement of the better nature of human beings, whether couched in terms of spiritual uplift or not ( Read more... )

I have a real weakness for flash mob musical surprises. Via mckitterick comes Darth Vader directing Carol of the Bells..

Another odd, and somewhat dark holiday related story told by Azdak here about the "Schlager," which word in German means hit or beat, but signifies to Germans a certain type of extremely treacly, sentimental songs. One of the longest enduring ( Read more... )

Happy Chanukah ( Read more... )

Today's post is pretty low key, about the stories people tell about holiday traditions. I would love it if any readers with a couple extra minutes would talk about what their older relatives told them about celebrations of holidays in days past ( Read more... )

When I was a kid, I really, really hated Thanksgiving. The main reason was because the adults would hammer us with extra speeches about patriotism and gratitude ( Read more... )