Christmas culture, etc.

Now that we're fully in the Christmas season, I got to attend two Christmas cultural events this week.

The first was the stage adaptation of White Christmas at CenterPoint Legacy Theatre. I like the movie, but I don't love the movie like other people do. The stage adaptation was OK. I thought the characters were caricatures of their movie counterparts, and there were a lot of unnecessary characters. But they kept the most important songs. (I think "Snow" needs to be a more widely played and recorded Christmas song!)

The second was the Lower Lights Christmas concert at Kingsbury Hall. I began following the Lower Lights in 2012 because Cherie Call, my favorite singer besides Lady Gaga, is part of the group. They're like a supergroup of local musicians. We have been attending their Christmas concerts since 2014, when they were still in the Masonic temple. 

Their concerts are a lot of fun. They just released two new digital-only albums, their first since 2016. They haven't done a Christmas album since 2013, even though it seems they have plenty of material, since they keep singing new Christmas songs. I'm glad they're still going, even though a lot of the band members have left Utah. But I do wish "Silent Night" wasn't the closing song for every Christmas event. The lyrics aren't even good!

Another Christmas cultural thing I did this week was to buy a fruitcake from Parsons' Bakery, because the only fruitcakes I have had have been mass-produced ones. I'm embarrassed to tell you how much I spent on it. But I'm glad I did, so I can have experience with this tradition. I have always thought jokes about fruitcakes are more common than actual fruitcakes. I liked it, but I understand why people don't like them; it definitely would not be something I choose over cookies, pies, or regular cake. But I hope to make my own sometime this season.

Also this week, editing assignments for Wayfare magazine started to trickle in. (My phone likes to autocorrect Wayfare to Warfare. Look below to see why I mention that here.)

And also this week, I had some extra time at my Church job. I am really interested in historical memory (how historic events are remembered and commemorated), and I remember coming across a hymn about the Pilgrim Fathers in a Latter-day Saint hymnal from the early twentieth century. I was looking for it and found it in the 1927 hymnal. The lyrics were written by a non–Latter-day Saint in the nineteenth century, when Americans loved the Pilgrims (before they retrofitted Thanksgiving to be about Pilgrims), and the music for this particular version was written by Evan Stephens. There are more hymns in our current hymnal written by Evan Stephens than by anyone else, and many believe he was gay.

Anyway, in the process of looking for this hymn, I was looking in the 1908 Deseret Sunday School Song Book, and in their topical index, they have an entry for Warfare! 

Can you imagine going to Sunday School and thinking, "Let's sing a song about warfare today"?!

But speaking of warfare: I went to Seagull Book this week and saw this very tacky decoration for sale. So you don't have to zoom in, I will describe it as a picture of a soldier with a gun, accompanied by wings and an American flag, with the caption "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

Now, from a purely artistic standpoint, even I, a nonartist, know that it is not good art. Perhaps worst of all, it uses the Papyrus font. But from a conceptual standpoint, it is using a scripture about Jesus to describe someone holding an assault rifle! At the very least, they could have used a less violent image of a soldier. I support soldiers and veterans, and I understand why we have a military, but this whole thing seems to be in very poor taste. I hope no one buys it.

And to end on a silly note: my Facebook feed is filled with posts from a page called Things With Faces, and today I looked in my garbage and noticed fingernail clippings in a clump of fur from Reggie's brush.