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| Swedish Yule Goat. Bit small, isn't it? |
Well, it's not far away. I have been mainlining Christmas songs in my singing groups (one of them since October) and I thought I'd share a few of my favourites here, after the rip-roaring success of The Bitter Withy. Panic ye not, no folk music here - we are in the popular music world.
I have few traditions at Christmas, and most of them have fallen by the wayside. I used to play two albums on Christmas morning. On a turntable, obviously. One song from each of those for you - first, from Phil Spector's Christmas album, here are The Ronettes singing Sleigh Ride. (I do like it when people post videos of artists singing a different song.)
And from Bing Crosby's White Christmas, here are Bing and the Andrews Sisters singing Mele Kalikimaka.
Isn't that festive?
And here we have what must be the greatest Christmas number 1 EVAAAH...(It's a peculiar video in many ways (note comment about the drummer) but as the only ones I could find from the 1970s were from Top of the Pops and rather sullied by the appearance of a discredited disc jockey, I couldn't bring myself to post any of them.) Are you hanging up your stockings on the wall? Have a dance on me.
Thanks for popping in - hope to see you in the salon.
Odd... I don't really think of them having Christmas on Hawaii (bit like the one we heard on a random tape in the car - Christmas on Christmas Island)...
ReplyDeleteThe Yule goat is outstanding!
Alison xx
I know - it's incongruous, isn't it? Wikipedia article on goat is well worth checking out - it's called the Gavle goat. Should be a thing over the a.
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You can get a much smaller version made of straw in Ikea....
ReplyDeleteHmm, I am interested to see the height of yours at its withers is 7.6m. We had a wither at yesterday's Singing for the Brain but it should really have been a whither....
gosh, that could lead to confusion...
DeleteMore information about strange Swedish Yule Lore to be found here
DeleteI am speechless!! As if the huge straw goat itself wasn't gobsmacking enough, there is the whole saga of it being set fire to..."The goat has since had a history of being burnt down roughly every other year" has now leapt to the top of my list of favourite sentences from Wikipedia.
ReplyDeleteThe confusion of withers and whithers must wreak its worst havoc amongst singers of quadruped-dominated English folk music. For which I am sure there is a special society.
Fequine?
DeleteThe straw goat was mentioned in G2 today, so, having never heard of it until encountering it in the salon, our paths crossed again as I was eating my sandwich in the Winter Gardens. (I suppose it would be more commentworthy had I been eating someone else's sandwich in the Winter Gardens)There was a choir singing and they were wearing red stetsons...
ReplyDeleteA beautiful Christmas experience!
DeleteTo begin with I had a vision of a red-stetsoned choir congregating around the burning withers of the Gävle goat (Ho yes! I can do the äää - if I'm going to be marked as competitive then I may (might?) as well be hung for a goat as a kid)
DeleteThen I realised that the stetsons were in Sheffield. Which is maybe even weirder. (Ooh look an exception to the i before e rule)
As you will no doubt know, the i before e "rule" isn't, there being far more cases of when it does not apply that when it does...see excellent QI where SF nearly had a heart attack trying to explain it to Lee Mack.
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