thoughts on christmas music and two years.

Today in Singers we got the rest of our Christmas music. Let me just start this post by saying how much I stinkin' LOVE Christmas music. It is the epitome of "warm-fuzzy" for me, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I honestly just love it, and I am very excited that it is again this time of year.

(On a side note, my first Christmas-music-listening-experience of this season was absolutely stolen from me and stomped on when I heard an awful rendition of Jingle Bells in a crusty Goodwill the day after Halloween. I was less than ecstatic, and I did not appreciate the setting, the awful music or the fact that I was being forced to listen to it the day after Halloween. Not okay.

As a general rule, I disagree with Christmas music before Thanksgiving. I think that after Thanksgiving, it is fair game, but I do not approve of being attacked by it as soon as people give out their last piece of Halloween candy and turn off their porch lights. I was genuinely disappointed that a not-so-great surprise version of Jingle Bells was the first sound of Christmas to grace my ears.

However, when preparing for Holiday concerts, it is necessary to start learning Christmas music in November or even October, which I think is fine. I will gladly make an exception to my above rule for this reason. First, it gives me an outlet to express my pre-Christmas excitement and it just simply brings me joy. It says, "Be excited, Christmas is coming," as opposed to the "YAY IT'S CHRISTMAS RIGHT NOW!" message that is forced upon me when stores put out Christmas decorations in September and attack me with premature Christmas carols. Secondly, there is just something wonderfully different about singing Christmas music than singing any other type of music. Words couldn't explain it if I tried, so I will leave it at that.)

Back to the point of why I began this post - today we got our Christmas music. We are singing an arrangement of Jingle Bells (not the crusty Goodwill version...) that we sang for the Holiday Concert back in 2008. I was so excited to get this, because this is actually a really fun song, and I started to laugh because there is a great LHS story attached.

Rewind to late November 2008, picture 40 Singers sitting in a rehearsal with Tim, our director at the time, trying to help us understand these weird rhythms. There is a section where the lyrics read,

Just get a bobtailed by,
Two-fourty for her speed,
Hitch her to an open sleigh and
Crack! She'll take the lead.

After "crack!" there is a clap added in that for some reason was giving us grief that day. So, Tim, who clearly did not have a college mind, began to chant, "Crack! [clap] She'll take the... Crack! [clap] she'll take the... Crack! [clap] She'll take the..." over and over in hopes of helping us get the rhythm. Of course, we all joined in, because let's be real, it was funny and we love a good opportunity to make anything more ridiculous than it has to be. Clearly, this became our running joke - trust LHS to take Christmas music and turn it into drugs. (Incidentally, we did get the rhythm right after that.) For the rest of the semester (and many semesters thereafter,) we made countless "take the crack" references and shared many laughs over this. Out of all of these came the original "take the crack" face, shown by Elaine in the above picture.

When I got this song handed out to me today, my brain said, "Hey, I've seen this before." I began to look and read through it, "No, not high school. Women's Chorus? No..." Then I found the CRACK page. "SHUT UP!" I shouted inside my head.

"YOU GUYS! This is the 'Take the Crack' song!" No one responded to this at all, and I was once again reminded of how old I am and how weird time is. Elaine, the only other Singer left from "back in the day," finally realized what I had said, and began to look through her copy. "It is!" she said an aw-I-love-remembering-things voice. As we began to work on the first few pages, she turned to me and said, "This was two years ago. It's it weird how much everything can change in just two years?"

And I thought, "Yes, yes it is."

And that is today's food for thought.

The best of "Take the Crack"