Therefore be Merry

I have spoken about Epiphany here before, and mentioned how my family always celebrates this last day of Christmas with merriment much along the lines of Christmas. It is always a very beautiful and happy day for us, and the expectation of it helps to maintain that sense of Christmas tide that might otherwise be lost in the day to day between the two feasts. From now until February, we are in the season of the Epiphany, and there is a continued sense of joy. This being the case, it seems appropriate to end the 12 days of Christmas with a song reminding us of this fact:

Here's a Health to the Company

 We cannot allow the Christmas season to pass without posting a wassail can we? Well, yes, I suppose we can, but it is rather fun to see if I can uncover a new-to-me wassailing song each year. This year's entry is an American wassail-- because, apparently, wassailing hopped the Atlantic. (You can read about the history here and here. Wassailing apparently got caught up with the Lord of Misrule stuff that I have always found rather repulsive, but I still like the tradition and the songs tend to be fun and catchy. And I like them, and this is my blog, so I will continue to post them. So there.)

The wassail I am posting is called The Kentucky Wassail, though I have come across at least one version that changes Kentucky to Ohio. I am not sure how old this song actually is. It may have been collected by John Jacob Niles, a noted musicologist from Kentucky, or it may have been something that he wrote himself, based off older Appalachian song traditions. It has lyrics that are similar to ones found in both the Gloucestershire Wassail, and the Somerset Wassail, though it definitely has a bit more of that mountain music swing that is associated with American traditional music. 

A Toast to the Professor

 If The Professor, J. R. R. Tolkien himself, was a long lived as his hobbits, today would be his 129th birthday. I celebrated by hosting a chicken dinner for my family, followed by a nice, nutty cake (the family's contribution to the feast) and tea. Followed by... well, my sister's ultimate cut of the Hobbit movies. Now, it should be made clear that I am not a fan of the Hobbit movies. I watched the first, and did not hate it. Indeed, the scene where the dwarves all starting singing the Misty Mountain song still seems to me to be a very good and inspiring scene. I watched the second, was disappointed by it, and disgusted with the stupid Kili and Tauriel thing. For a good long while, I did not bother with the last, having no desire to watch the Professor's delightful story to be increasingly ransacked, nor the well cast Bilbo be a side character in his own movies. When I finally did watch it, I fully expected it to be a disappointment.... but somehow, it managed to disappoint even more than I thought it would-- quite a feat, that. However, my sister manage to take the bloated bores that those three movies were, ruthlessly eliminate all the dead weight (No Tauriel at all, no White Orc, no weird side story with Gandalf, the Elves and the Necromancer, a bare minimum of strange elves defying physics.) while also adding back in scenes from the extended edition-- notably, allowing Beorn to actually be a character-- and the result was a surprisingly watchable 3 hour movie. We paused it at 9 pm, so that we could lift our glasses of Good Drink, and in unison toast, "To the Professor" quite heartily, which was ridiculously good fun. Throw in the fact that we were able to have Mass today, and you have a perfect Tolkien Birthday.

In honour of the good Professor, and this blessed season in which he was born, I am posting a song that I am ridiculously pleased to have found. There is a bit of a story as to how I came across it: to whit I got an odd notion that perhaps Earendel/Earendil, brightest of stars, may have been given the task of guiding the Wisemen to find our Lord in Bethlehem. I sort of wondered if anyone else had had that idea, and if there mightn't be a picture of it. Though, alas, pictures were not to be had, apparently, the Right Reverend Charles William Stubbs did indeed have the same idea I did, but he got it before Tolkien even came up with his own brightest of stars. The Right Reverend Charles William Stubbs wrote a poem, called The Carol of the Star, in which he explicitly identifies the Christmas Star as Earendel. The invaluable Hymns and Carols of Christmas has this posted on their website, along with sheet music to the music it was later set to. Nothing for it, of course, but to try to find a recording.... which I did eventual, but only after I abandoned poor Reverend Stubbs in my searching, and stuck entirely to the composer, T. Tertius Noble. And lo and behold, here is a Christmas carol, in which we sing "Hail Earendel!" as the refrain:

The Old Year Now Away is Sped

 In the only real blog post I made in 2020 that was not a Christmas post, I mention the very many good and beautiful things that occurred, despite the year being somewhat more fraught than anyone expected. I still hold that 2020 was a year full of a great number of very good things, though shortly after I composed that piece, life became increasingly more complicated than need be. It is quite difficult to navigate a world in which every blessed person must have a covered face, if one happens to be prone to claustrophobia and anxiety. Work becomes difficult, involving doctor's notes, and reclassifications. Shopping for necessities becomes a great burden. Day to day life becomes odd, as one tries to navigate through all of this-- and after a while, quite demoralising-- especially when there does not seem to be an end in sight. Yet, in the balance against this, is the fact that our local Church (while not always able to offer Mass) has never closed. I have been able to make daily visits to the Blessed Sacrament, and there is Adoration every Monday. There have been lovely astronomical events, including the Neowise comet in late July, and the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, just before Christmas-- both of which we observed out at the lake, looking through my younger sister's telescope. Its just strong enough to allow you to see incredibly tiny moons lined up next to Jupiter, and just enough of Saturn's rings to understand why Galileo thought that planet had "ears". There have been many blessings in my family, and the expectation of more to come. In all, 2020 was a year that I would prefer to never live through again, but which has, in many ways, been good for me. I would like to say that I have great hopes for 2021, but I do not. I have a very modest hope that it will be better than the preceding year. (Dare I opine that it could hardly be worse? That seems like tempting fate.) But hopeful or not, I am glad to see the back of 2020 (good riddance) and please God, grant us (at the very least) normality in this new year. 

I'm posting this song today, for no reason in particular, saving that I like it. Its originally in Welsh, and it keeps its Welsh title (meaning lullaby), despite being sung in English. Nor are the words to this version of it anything like the Welsh original, which is merely a lullaby and not particularly Christmasy. This particular version of Suo Gân was originally from an Irish Tenors' CD, though I only heard it when a friend of mine recorded a long, 2 hour tape of mostly Irishy Christmas music for me: