How Lovely Are Thy Branches: A Young Wizards Christmas (16 page)

“It’s so true,” Nita said, looking back toward the kitchen, and Kit.

“Meantime,” Filif said. “About Christmas. I keep forgetting to ask.
How
long does this go on?”

Nita was just opening her mouth when Kit’s mama put her head through the passthrough.

“Twelve days,” she said.

Filif looked at Nita. “It’ll take at least that long to sort out this Santa Claus character,” he said. “Let’s get started.”

Afterword

How Lovely Are Thy Branches
has been in progress, on and off, for several years. It was first conceived in 2011 while I was working on the “outline” for the “Christmas special”
The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank
, which appears
here
; and it was in relation to the outline that
HLATB
was first mentioned, at the bottom of
this post.
(Six
Tasks
is of course itself a somewhat thinly veiled joke about / reference to other Christmas specials such as the classic Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year. Many thanks again to Bob Schooley for his assistance with matters relating to Hank.)

Much of this work was written to Christmas music, as you might imagine. An informal playlist, referring to the chapter titles:

“We Need A Little Christmas”
: The song comes from the musical
Mame.
Here
is Angela Lansbury singing the lead vocal on the original 1966 Broadway cast recording, or
here
in live performance with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir & Orchestra. Or
here at Amazon
.

“Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow”
A classic written by Sammy Cohn and Jule Styne when they were trapped in Hollywood during a heat wave, and covered since then by almost everybody you can think of. The original Vaughn Monroe recording of the old favorite (probably best known these days for turning up at the end of
Die Hard
) is
here.
A smooth-but-upbeat Big Band-era, boogie-woogie-ish rendition by Frank Sinatra is
here.
For something more recent, try
Idina Menzel’s cover.

“O Come, All Ye Faithful”:
The English-language restatement of the Latin title
Adeste Fideles.
Hugely popular in both the English and Latin versions. The
“Three Tenors” version here
contains both. A 1950s-ish cover by Mario Lanza is
here.

“O Tannenbaum”:
Dissected here in some detail by the participants. German-language versions worth listening to are this one by
Andrea Bocelli
— in Italian, with different words
again
— and this one by
Nana Mouskouri.
...For many North Americans, the best-known version is
the famous instrumental from
A Charlie Brown Christmas,
performed by the Vince Guaraldi Trio.

“Bring A Torch, Jeanette, Isabella”
():
Traditional, French, and four centuries old,
give or take a few decades; possibly better known these days as an instrumental than a vocal (though
here is a typical vocal rendition by the Robert Shaw Chorale
. One cheerful instrumental cover is
this one by Loreena McKennitt.

“In The Bleak Midwinter”
():
Relatively new as carols go;
written by the poet Christina Rosetti in the 1870s, and set to music by numerous composers including Gustav Holst, who did what’s probably now
the best-known setting.
Another nice version is
this Allison Crowe cover.

“I’ll Be Home For Christmas”:
Its
original 1943 recording by Bing Crosby
(the B side of “White Christmas”) remains a watershed, but many many other artists have covered it over the years. The
Frank Sinatra cover
is worth hearing, as is the
Michael Bublé one.

Some other minor issues:

Bubble lights:
See the incredible patent hoohah surrounding the introduction (and shameless pirating) of these lights
here.

The fire kink:
The special Christmas tree candle holders that Markus goes back to fetch from his home in (somewhere near Freiburg) can be seen
here
at the website of that superlative online (and offline) German department store, Manufactum:. Older solutions to the candles-on-the-tree problem can be seen
here
at OldChristmasTreeLights.com

The Winter Solstice lunar eclipse of 2010:
The first time the Solstice coincided with a total lunar eclipse since the 1990s: the next such coincidence will not occur until 2094. Details of this eclipse can be found here at
Fred Espenak’s excellent website.