Upcoming events:
Dec. 14, 7 p.m.
candlelight worship/concert First UMC
Pittsburgh, PA
Dec. 24, 8 p.m. Christmas Eve
service
Third Presbyterian Church, Pittsburgh PA
5701 Fifth Ave. |
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This week on the blog:
Friday, December 6, 2019
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For several years now, I have been watching with interest the doings
of the little people atop our entertainment center as each December they
enact a series of strange variations upon the traditional Christmas
creche. No sooner had I adjusted to their peculiar games of sheep
tossing or thrilled to the dramatic attempt of the wise men to arrive on
the proper shelf in time for Christmas than I got sued for letting our
cable box too near the stable. That was last year. By then, I had
already gotten to talk to Mary and Joseph by email--a delightful couple.
I am not the grudge holding type, and fences were mended with a very
large Christmas cookie. I was already looking forward to next year's
adventure when a very regrettable thing happened.
One of the cast members did not make it back into the box for storage
last year. We noticed him some time in February, peering timidly out
from behind a plant. It was too late to retrieve the box, packed snugly
into its regular storage position. Instead, we tried to make him
comfortable until he could join his fellows. He kept a diary, and has
allowed me to publish excerpts from it. First I had to copy it to
several times its original size. The entries are enlightening. Alas,
they do not cast us humans in the best light always. But even--perhaps,
especially--at Christmas, it is worth reflecting on the views of a small
person on the society in which he involuntarily found himself, fish out
of water, a figure without a tableaux, creche-person without a creche,
in the long year between Christmases:
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At this most festive time of year, it behooves us at
Pianonoise to continue our series about how legendary composers spent their
Christmases. Today we look at the yuletide of one Peter Illyich Tchaikovsky,
who...
What? You aren't dying to know this?
Actually, the story is fairly well known, at least if you
attend symphony concerts and read the program notes. For the other 99 hundredths
of you, perhaps you will be touched, maybe inspired in some way by the events
which are about to unfold in the telling. But believe me, dewey-eyed romantics,
the snow falling outside the window at the Moscow conservatory is about the only
thing about this story that is not ugly. So for those who do not want their
Christmas cheer interrupted by a harsh dose of (albeit someone else's) reality,
or for children under 10, we recommend skipping this page and watching some nice
dancing hamsters for a few minutes instead. We'll wait.
For those of you intrepid souls who wish to continue, here
are the sordid facts:
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Each Christmas a little drama unfolds atop our
entertainment center. To you it may be just the
same old Christmas story, with some people in a
barn having a baby and a cast of handfuls
looking on adoringly. Well, it may be the same
old boring story to you, but it depends on how
you tell it.
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the Christmas story you've never heard
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Maybe there weren't dinosaurs at the first Christmas, but we can fix
that.... |
[t]here's one thing that I do enjoy every year.
Not the Christmas carol parodies, or the Night
Before Christmas parodies, or all the radio
stations playing Sleigh Ride 45 times a day for
a month and a half. It's something our Bible
study group does the last week of the semester.
We go to the local Toys (reverse R) Us and boy
toys for kids who might not get any this year
because their families are on hard times.
....
This year I went with a dinosaur. Not just any
dinosaur, mind you. This one was over two feet
tall! With a very pink tongue! And scary all the
same, even if he had just swallowed a vat of
Pepto Bismol.
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[email protected]
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