Christmas Memories
Many years ago, we visited the Unitarian church in the town where we were then living. They happened to have a music director, named Luther, who, among other things, had an amazing tenor voice and an aqua-colored, flowered Tuba. For some reason, I chatted with him for a bit, and found him to be friendly and not at all as forbidding as the conservatory students where I went to college. Those students made it clear that there were real musicians in the world, i.e. them, and then people who liked to do music, but weren't talented enough to be real musicians, i.e. people like me. Sort of like my friend Henry Brodkin used to say of the word goyim. There are the chosen people, and then there are the others. Musically, I was an other.
Anyway, Luther, the music director, didn't make me feel like an other, and next thing I knew, he was trying to teach me to sing. After all, as Luther used to say, "everyone can be taught to sing acceptably". In some respects, he did pretty well. I improved greatly under his patient tutelage, and most people would say I do indeed sing acceptably, perhaps even better than that. One is, however, limited by one's innate talent, and I never got good enough that anyone would ever consider giving me money to sing. But that wasn't important to me. All I ever wanted to be was a guy in the choir. Thanks to Luther, I got good enough that very few church choirs would now turn me away.
At some point, Luther decided to write some songs and record them. So he came out with a series of tapes. The subject of this post is the one he called Christmas Memories. The first side contains songs he wrote about the joys of Christmas from the perspective of Norwegian Lutheran from North Dakota. He extols the virtues of the various Norwegian Christmas delicacies, such as lutefisk and gamelost (some kind of smelly cheese), but most importantly about glögg.
Glögg is a potent adult-style beverage. My son Zach and I like to make it every year. While we make it, we sing along to Luther's Johnson's Glögg. One of the recipe requirements for Glögg is that you sample as you cook along. Such sampling means, among other things, that singing Johnson's Glögg along with Luther, over and over again, is never boring. At least not to Zach and me. Out spouses might have a different opinion on this.
Anyway, the point of all this is to tell you that I have made a special on-line flash player that plays all the songs in Luther's Christmas Memories, including, of course, Johnson's Glögg.
Skol!
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