Advent aesthetics and all that...

Dianne (loving spouse and partner) and I just had a breakfast conversation about the very different aesthetics people bring to Christmas/Advent music. We both tend to avoid the traditional shtick of the season as too sentimental, overblown and often offensive. Our tastes run toward esoterica, Celtic, traditional English choirs, guitar and Windham Hill collections. This great new song by Loreena McKennit just about gets it all right.

Now I have nothing against Perry Como, Andy Williams and the over-the-top recordings of Andre Boecelli, but they don't feed my soul. So, over the years we have amassed a huge collection of quiet, reflective and joyful Christmas recordings. We even have some of the great weird collections like Dr. Demento or things like "Santa Do the Mambo" and Phil Spector's Christmas.

Working retail this year, Di decided to bring some of our tunes into work and spent the better part of a day last week making CD mixes. It was her hope that besides all the regular stuff, there might be room for something more meditative. But the jury is now in from her store where the word is: "I would rather listen to NOTHING than this crap!" Well, we knew that we tended towards the more obscure tunes at a Lessons and Carols celebration - and while I own Bing Crosby's Christmas album it rarely gets played (the cover is the real treasure) - but we didn't realize how outside the norm our tastes had become.

It reminds me of the time daughter Jesse, now 30+, came home from seminary day care one day and announced with profound 5 year old indignation: "Do you know what I just heard? That some people - on Thanksgiving - actually eat... TURKEYS! Can you imagine?!!?" (We were hardcore vegetarians at the time and her "isolation"prompted a quick rethinking and a search for greater balance.) Hard to be in the world, yes, but not always part of it?

Alas, it takes all types and explains the on-going tension we both feel during much of this season, too. To revel in the journey - the waiting and the anticipation of Advent - is a counter cultural act when much of the culture is charging towards instant gratification (at least nobody was trampled to death at WalMart on Black Friday this year!)

I sense that there is also a melancholia to Advent that seems to be discouraged in our quest for "comfort and joy." For while I can't get enough of "In the bleak midwinter," I also can't forget that someone once told me after worship, "I just can't take too many of those minor key hymns... too sad." Which makes me wonder how it is we learn to hold both our sorrow alongside our celebration: if not church, where?

I guess I'll just have to watch the "Charlie Brown Christmas" show and skip "Frosty" and "Rudolf" once again this year...