Today concludes this year’s 12 Days of Christmas Music series, and I hope you have enjoyed it. Have a wonderful holiday. Even if you aren’t celebrating Christmas, I hope you take pleasure in not having to go to work or in hopefully coming into contact with fewer frustrations in your day.
All the best. See you in the new year, if not sooner.
I need to lighten the mood a little around here.
Time for a little hometown blues rock. Carolyn Wonderland is from Houston. I’m just going to leave this here for you to enjoy while I go off and try to grade finals.
No introduction today. Just a song.
I love it when people reinvent traditional songs. (You might have noticed this.) This one, “12 Days After Christmas” by the Mix Up Quartet, is super cute, if a little grisly. Enjoy!
Unless you’ve been living under a boulder the size of a bantha or have eschewed all mention of pop culture anywhere, then you know why I’m posting this song today.
Maybe you’re not a fan of the movies, the books, the universe that is inspired. My fandom doesn’t require that you be.
Episode IV was the first movie I saw in a cinema, and it had a profound impact on me. Not just because it was a movie and I hadn’t seen one on the big screen before. Not just because Princess Leia was the kind of strong woman that I think my mother wanted me to become. Not just because the special effects were groundbreaking for their time. All those things, yes.
But also? Because my father in his youth was a comics and sci-fi fiend. I saw all the big movies with him — the Star Wars films, Star Trek, Superman, the list goes on — and he read me Spider-Man comics at bedtime. As he got older, his fandom subsided under the weight of his adult responsibilities, and this thing we shared became something of a fond memory.
But today, later this morning, I will be at a cinema with him. And with my mom and my brother (who’s home for a few days from Hong Kong) and my sister and my husband and my children. We will share this awesome thing again.
I hope the movie is good, I really do. But even if it’s not as great as I hope it will be, I will probably love the experience of being there with my family, and that, for me, is enough.
Enjoy.
…so there’s something I’ve been working on for a while now, and it’s finally come to fruition.
You probably know about my magic realism novella, Finis., which came out as an ebook in August of last year. Well, now you can get it in paperback! Illustrated!
I teamed up with the fantastic, Houston-based artist Lauren Taylor, who illustrated several scenes in the story with her expressive and distinctive pen-and-ink style. Her renderings of these key moments are so lovely, and I’m thrilled to have been able to include her work in the print edition. It’s available now via Amazon Prime (just in time for that last-minute holiday shopping, yes?) and the CreateSpace eStore.
Happy holidays!
Today has been a frenetic day (which is why this post is coming to you so late). But this song is a wonderful, soothing antidote to mind-stress.
Enjoy George Winston’s piano rendition of another one of my favorites, “Carol of the Bells,” from his Wyndham Hill album December. This song, this version of it, this arrangement and its performance, are gorgeous.
So, last year I included this song, which I first heard in the movie Love, Actually (which I love, actually), and which I enjoy listening to, which I love, actually (see what I did there?), when I’m bopping around in the car on my way through traffic, singing at the top of my lungs. It’s fun.
My husband will have none of it, though. The song makes his ears bleed. In fact, all songs by Mariah Carey do. Fair enough.
This is for him.
And, since I’m posting it on the blog, also for you. Enjoy.
Remember how yesterday I said I’d have more than one version of this song? I encountered two really lovely ones this year, and here’s the second one. Enjoy!
Now I’m off to grade more papers, because finals.
Sappho's Torque 