The Round-Up: December 2024
A monthly miscellany of interesting links and tidbits
A slightly early edition of the Round-Up this month, since it includes a generous amount of Christmas-related items that you might want to enjoy before the holiday. (Although I am a firm proponent of treating the week between Christmas and New Year’s as part of the Christmas season. Much better to enjoy our Christmas music and lights and stories all through December than to start in October but have all the decor down and the radio stations switched back to their usual fare on the 26th!)
I also want to take a moment here to say thank you to all of you who have subscribed to The Second Sentence since I moved to Substack three months ago. To my paid subscribers especially—your support is a real blessing as well as an encouragement. And to each and every one of you at every subscription level, I’m so happy you’re here, and I’ve got some fun stuff planned for the coming year that I hope you’ll enjoy!
As I was browsing through books of old carols while working on this month’s post on forgotten Christmas songs, I noticed the opening line of this lovely carol by Robert Herrick seemed familiar: “What sweeter music can we bring...” I realized that John Rutter’s setting of it was familiar to me. Going back and listening to it again after having read the words more carefully, I appreciated its beauty so much more!
A delightful and intriguing glimpse at how one family trimmed their Christmas tree in rural Wyoming in 1905, from the letters of schoolteacher Ethel Waxham.
Here’s a brief test to see whether you can identify ten pieces of poetry as Ai-generated in the style of famous authors, or the genuine article. I scored 8/10—and interestingly, the two I got wrong were choices I made against my initial gut instinct. I don’t consider myself a poetry expert by any means, but I’m glad I seem to have at least a general instinct here.
While we’re on the subject of poetry, George Herbert’s “Providence” is just magnificent—and also a wonderful example of a Christian view of the relationship between man and nature, such as I mused about in last month’s post.
More George Herbert:
’s spotlight on Herbert’s “The Call” made me aware of Ralph Vaughn Williams’ “Five Mystical Songs,” settings of Herbert’s poems from 1911. I had to go and listen to them at once and they are simply marvelous. New ambition is to one day be in a choir performing this work.After this year’s viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life, I tracked down the two issues of the Saturday Evening Post visible on a rack in Mr. Gower’s drugstore in the scene from George’s childhood!
Enjoy two sets of very different but equally beautiful winter landscape paintings: from Claude Monet and Maxfield Parrish.
Here’s a frontier Christmas story from 1887 by Charles King: “Captain Santa Claus.” Very much in the heartwarming Victorian Christmas story tradition, but combined with King's knack for depicting everyday life on a Western cavalry post.
I absolutely adore this Scott Gustafson artwork for The Nutcracker. I’ve always been fond of Gustafson’s illustrations for Peter Pan, and the Nutcracker has been deeply nostalgic for me since I was in a production at age seven, so this combination particularly delighted me.
If you enjoy instrumentals of classic Christmas carols, The Music of Christmas by Percy Faith and his orchestra is a fine album to listen to. Most of the arrangements are a little richer and more classic than some of Faith’s more sugary easy-listening repertoire.
Finally, if you love a good Western Christmas story, this one that I wrote some years ago is still one of my personal favorite pieces of short fiction I’ve written. I’ve kept it available free on my blog as a kind of perpetual Christmas gift for readers, though it has also been collected in book form:
