I’ve managed to escape involvement in my hometown church’s Christmas spectacle for the past few years—not out of lack of spirit, certainly, more like I’ve taken a recent disinterest in spectacles put on for well-meaning but awkward reasons. I was almost roped in to a larger degree this year because they almost didn’t have enough wise men for the second shift and the coordinator noticed I had a beard and what....
Anyway. I was part of the instrumental ensemble for the Christmas Eve service, which in this town consisted of myself and my father on trombone, one trumpet, two saxophones, a flute, and a bass clarinet. Slated for four tunes, one of which we lost the flute part for some years ago, before I handled copying and knew where everything was. Then, apparently, people would forget to copy until the last minute or so and just put the original music in the book, then forget about it and throw it away later in the week, which was how we lost many individual parts. These books were probably ten years older than me.
And actually, the bass clarinet music hadn’t been copied by those responsible for it, and naturally we found out twenty minutes before the start, so as the only person who really knew the location and organisation of the music library I went up and handled that end, figuring out in the process how to work the brand new copier that had been installed—I swear, that place gets more new gadgets that they don’t hardly need every few months—and as recompense for my efforts swiped a few candy pumpkins that I noticed sitting in a bag of Halloween candy (at Christmas wtf) which someone had attempted to cleverly conceal.
So we get underway, and our pastor, who was channeling the spirit of William Shatner on this particular occasion, goes on a long, unnecessarily rambling, drawn out monologue about not dripping candle wax on the floor (I’ll explain in due course) which took literally ten minutes to finish, then proceeds to publicly recognise (he emphasised his desire to do so ‘publicly’) our sound man in another long, drawn out monologue, then proceeded to go into yet a third long, drawn out monologue about—but I quit listening at this point and began examining the program order, which I shall now recreate and further bore you all.
=)
The Sounds of Christmas
‘Angels We Have Heard On High’ [congregational]
The Christmas Account (scripture chosen by Minister to Children)
Tolling of The Christmas Bell (Mary and Joseph come to the stable with Baby Jesus)
Someday (choir; shepherds/wise men enter)
Solo ( [name] )
‘Joy To The World’ [cong.]
‘The First Noel’ [cong.]
The Lighting of The Christ Candle
Solo ( [name] )
As We Go (Thoughts For The Season)
‘Silent Night, Holy Night’ [cong.]
Lighting of The Candles
A Christmas Prayer
Soooooo yes. I’m sure you can guess what’s coming.
After we made it through the pastoral . . . er, soliloquy, we technically opened with a nice organ piece. Lots of stop changes (different rows of pipes, different sounds, etc.), peppy arrangement, fun little thing to listen to. And of course the following hymn was as per usual—though the person standing in for our music director is a trained operatic vocalist who doesn’t quite grasp the concept of piano dynamics, which is about the male equivalent of Grandma Jones on the Screeching Soprano.
Then we had The Christmas Account. Or rather, The Christmas Account: Special or Platinum Edition or Whatever (true quote) in which the children’s minister read an Extended Version of the Christmas Story which appeared to have been drawn straight out of the My First Bible, with nary a compound or complex sentence to be found. (And trust me, I’m rather familiar with those passages, since I hear them almost every year about this time. I know how they’re usually structured, and yes I’m aware that that probably makes me a little more Aspergic than usual.) The chosen passages actually ran up until several months after the child’s birth, leading up to his dedication at the temple and the meeting with Simeon and Anna, which unfortunately have absolutely no bearing on the celebration of the Savior’s birth thing that, you know, this whole thing was supposed to be about.
Then the, eh, cast of our Nativity scene entered from the rear up the center aisle in a sort of unintentionally macabre processional to the Tolling of The Christmas Bell. First off, I wasn’t aware there was a Christmas Bell at all, so that struck me as a singular display of pageantry. Second, ‘tolling’ is kind of morbid. It implies a finality, and in tandem with a joyous occasion serves mostly to deaden the mood and bring out the cynic in me, who is shining altogether too brightly right now.
Third, our esteemed sound man rang his handbell sixteen times. (And waved a wireless mic around near it, as if handbells need any help in getting their delightful sound to any part of a sanctuary the size of the foyer of The Hilton.) And although I reasoned he did so because he was told to ring it until the scene on stage was set, the bell conjures most immediately a clock (which also didn’t exist at the time, I don’t think) and clocks don’t operate on military time. So now this bell became kind of disembodied and phantasmal, almost, and reminded me simultaneously of Poe and Metallica—the latter of which I started singing under my breath, earning me a sharp elbow from my father.
Choir song following this travesty was a decent emotive piece, with the voices of Mary and Joseph soloing in turn. The shepherds and wise men were supposed to enter here, as indicated above, but they actually came in with the entire scene, so that was bizarre.
Then followed a solo by one of the high-schoolers. Song was “Mary, Did You Know”, sung by a guy who my father and I suspect of playing for the other team and have suspected so for years (I mean, there’s effeminacy and there’s “son, you do realise there are no straight men who wave their hands like that”), who apparently aspires to be a Country star, and who suffers from The Curse of the Generic School Chorus Teacher where the singers are taught to over-enunciate everything (rendering the title line more like ‘uhMä-Rie Did-uhYou Knouuuu’) and basically lock into the Chorale singing style for everything (which is nice for chorales but not nice for anything else that requires stylistic knowledge) while abandoning any sense of time or rhythm in favor of depending on a playback track which renders them utterly inept at entrances and slightly paranoid whenever there aren’t any harmony vocals on the track. (Incidentally, you ain’t gonna be a Country star without a sense of rhythm.)
This is also the reason I can’t watch Glee. Ever since I heard their god-awful version of Don’t Stop Believin’ I have felt this way. Hooray for chorus groups and what, but if you’re gonna sing in loads of styles that everyone loves ,for the love of all that is good and wonderful in this world please learn the damned styles you’re butchering. If I walked into an orchestral audition and played the trombone excerpt from The Ride of The Valkyries in New Orleans funeral march style I would be crucified, literally crucified on the spot, and you think it’s kosher to try rock as if it was Somewhere Over The Rainbow? And people pay them to perform these atrocities! (Because it’s ‘clever’. To which I say the hell do you think you know what ‘clever’ means, and begin heaving Thorndyke-Barnhardts with a murderous abandon.)
(And while I’m ranting feverishly, I can stand effeminate men, and I can tolerate white guys who try to act ‘black’, but I have a rather difficult time coping with effeminate men who try to act like black sisters. It’s . . . I dunno, I think it’s the obscene aura of falseness that permeates the atmosphere around them combined with a smothering sense of manufactured estrogen. It just makes me want to set up hazmat wash stations every couple of blocks in a sixty mile radius. Gyaah.)
(Nevermind that I can impersonate them to a T.)
Anyway, the service. Yes. *ahhrrm*
Two more hymns. Easy stuff, except the music man forgot to prompt the congregation to stand so they remain glued to their pews, which I found extraordinarily funny.
Then came The Lighting of The Christ Candle. And you may ask yourself, why is he capitalising all these ‘The’s that he shouldn’t be capitalising? And you may ask yourself, isn’t he the guy who should at least know basic grammar rules? And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife!
Sorry. To answer, though, I give you three letters: sic. The person who does these bulletins and programs and stuff is an aspiring writer who unfortunately in her old age seems to have forgotten how any normal human being acts (in her fiction, which I have had the misfortune of reading) and how to apply capitalisation rules to articles. And it’s not your beautiful wife. It’s Raine. She’s made of pixels, Ace, find a real woman.
So this candle, The Christ Candle (golly gee whillikers does that sound like an ikon), is part of the Advent Wreath, which contains five candles of various and sundry meanings which I conveniently forget every time I hear them. Three of them are purple, one of them is pink (for some apparently meaningful reason), and the center one is white, representing The Christ and all this completely unnecessary hoopla. Preceding the lighting (even ‘the lighting’ sounds pretentious, I’m sorry—no I’m not, who am I kidding) was a reading of a brief essay written by the aforementioned aspiring writer (coincidence, I swear; it changes every year who reads/lights each candle) whereupon I again stopped paying attention in favor of wondering why it was necessary to bring hay up onto the stage for the nativity scene which had long since left, only tuning back in at the end because the person lighting the candle was attempting an unorthodox method.
So matches are apparently dangerous. Don’t ask me why. I guess it’s a child safety thing, and thus logically one must use a mechanical safety lighter when everyone near the wreath is over the age of sixty. Oh wait.
The husband of the reader, in a daring show of defiance to The Establishment which had decreed that Thou Shalt Use one of those pointy-clicky aggravating mechanical lighter thingies with triggers, had apparently brought his own means along in the form of a pointy-clicky aggravating mechanical lighter thingy in the shape of a pistol.
And after about thirty seconds of fumbling vainly with it—click click clickity-click-click—he fully demonstrated its antiquity and his futility by shifting from it to the provided pointy-clicky aggravating mechanical lighter thingy. Unfortunately, he also fumbled with that for about ten more seconds before it caught, and then the first attempt at actually lighting the candle failed, which required five more seconds to relight the lighter and another three to catch the wick alight.
And a match would have been snick-pwoof, light, done. Hooray technology. How ever did we survive without thee.
And then came another solo. Except it didn’t. It was actually a duet, alto and soprano singing “O Holy Night” very nicely, if only the soprano had been credited. Congraturations, you knowredge of the Engrish ranguage is onry outshined by you attention to detair. May you eat a smarr puppy and have rong rife.
No, really, that duet was honestly one of the brighter spots of the evening. Wonderful job by the both of them, great blend and balance, very beautifully sung.
But lovely things don’t make for good writing all the time, so Onward We Go!!
. . . to “As We Go: Thoughts For The Season”, also known as “I’m Getting a Sermon In Here by Hook or by Crook Just You Watch Me”.
For reference, the pastor there is a staunch follower of the school of preaching wherein you make as many of your points as possible in triplicate sets, no matter what they might be or how tenuously they might be connected. This evening’s ‘thoughts’ turned out to be more a lecture on how we approach the Christmas season, with three people as examples. First up was the innkeeper, whose “. . . day had been busy, his body was tired, his mind was preoccupied; he had no room for the Savior,” which is all well and good and sounds good when you say it but doesn’t make one lick of sense when you think about it. (Hint: Joseph weren’t walkin’ around with a flashing neon sign saying “I’M MARRIED TO THE EXPECTANT MOTHER OF GOD”.)
Second was Herod, who was hostile to Jesus; “. . . so often, we’re hostile.” That was pretty much the gist of his point, summed up there in four words, two of which are his most common catchphrase: ‘so often, _____’. Nothing else really of import there except that he basically recounted Herod’s actions and managed to call him “the man who made Bethlehem’s streets run red with the blood of infants”. (Which is technically true . . . .)
Batting third was the aged Simeon, and here was where I realised why the passages about the baby dedication had been included earlier: he was already in everyone’s heads by association, so no one was going to bat an eye at the inclusion of a guy who wasn’t even involved with the birth to begin with, and certainly wasn’t celebrating Christmas ever, what since it came with Catholicism some years later. (Insert obligatory Eddie Izzard reference about the teachings of Cathol.) And here I once again stopped paying attention, for I was intent on changing the previous line of the program to Solo Duet and had abruptly realised that instead of one yellow Ticonderoga pencil and one generic green pencil in my pocket, I mysteriously had two yellow Ticonderogas and no greens and hadn’t actually removed any pencils since I put the green one back in, which as you can imagine for me is incredibly distracting.
I always know what pencils are in my pocket. Shut up.
And then the program did something silly, because we had our little candle-lighting ceremony after that spiel was done with, and played ‘Silent Night’ as ambient music during it. I forget how the candle-lighting ceremony was justified here, but you all know what it is. Someone somewhere gets a candle lit, and then they let the person next to them light their candle off of the lit one, puff puff pass, wash rinse repeat, yadda yadda yadda, doobity doobity doo. And naturally someone had been thoughtful enough to provide the musicians with their own candles so we could participate, totally forgetting that musicians use both of their hands to play, rendering the gesture completely useless except for those three-armed bassoonists of which we were fresh out.
And then we had A Christmas Prayer which turned out to be just a prayer, really, not as big a deal as the capitals implied, and then we were dismissed with our pastor saying “May God bless you, may the Spirit be upon you, Mayerry Christmas”. Upon hearing this oh-so-obvious (to me) attempt at the triplicate rigamarole again I burst out laughing and was conveniently covered up by the hum of a large talking group of people having just stood up after ninety minutes of being stuck in a pew.
Why do they call them pews, anyway? It’s such a ridiculous word . . . .
I know why they go through this every year, though. The old people love pageants and productions. And in the Southern Baptist world, the Blue-Hairs dictate everything.
Damn, this is four and a half pages long.
