Hooray for Christmas! (1966)

From: Eric
Date: January 2, 2013 8:59:09 AM CST
Subject: i may just spend the rest of 2013 listening to the longines symphonette, ...
and you'll have to deal with it.

Christmas at the Fireside, presented by the Longines Symphonette Recording Society, is my Christmas-music plumb line.

Have I written previously at the HP about this boxed set? It seems like I have.

No … not that I can find quickly through the site-search box. But this doesn’t seem right at all. I feel certain I have written about these records. The internet really is amazing, but it also really is still so frustrating so much of the time. It is so great already, in fact, that it’s now easy to see how great still it could one day be—and then the backwash of that line of thinking is the not-there-yet frustration.

This is life in the here and now, of course—the unearned blessing of the great moments, the glimpse of the perfect those deliver and the restlessness that gathers as a result. And so here we are, trying to remind each other to wait faithfully, trying to remind each other to not be jerks, trying to remind each other to be thankful, trying to love one another, trying to remind each other to live out our particular callings of commonly sourced creativity and trying to remind each other to share the gifts we have been given.

According to an ornate, square piece of carboard tucked inside the Christmas at the Fireside box, among the four records, the Longines Symphonette Recording Society was “an educational service of The Longines-Wittmauer Watch Company.” It also says, …

For years, Mishel Piastro has wanted to bring togehter in a simple anthology the music that really sets the mood for the holiday season. In America, Christmas is the season of brotherhood and good fellowship, of solemn religious significance, of happiness … and the time of year that uniquely belongs to children. 

Only music can capture the many moods of this spirit … and now Maestro Mishal Piastro, the Longines Symphonette and the Holiday Choraliers have created for you this aptly titled Treasury of the complete, nostalgic, emotional music … “CHRISTMAS AT THE FIRESIDE.”

I have a brother who works for an acoustical company. That’s what they call it—“an acoustical company.” He was telling me a couple of days ago about how designing a room for spoken-word stuff and designing a room for music are two different activities. For spoken words, you want very little reverberation; for music, you want a whole bunch of reverberation. So you use different technologies to achieve the different desired effects. It’s amazing to me that people have applied themselves to figure that stuff out over the generations and passed it down. Seriously, it’s a miraculous thing. Anyway, he was saying how challenging it is to set up a theater or whatever where one night you might have somebody talking and the next night you might have some bodies--a symphonette recording society and some choraliers, perhaps--playing music. I can imagine how frustrating that might be, given what he said about the different acoustical technologies.

Now I really do feel like I wrote about these Longines Symphonette records at the HP the more that I think about it. I’m pretty sure I included a picture of an ad for this boxed set. I’m pretty sure that’s true.

I should also note that I just rediscovered that I have two of these boxed sets—a red-trimmed set that my parents-in-law gave me (the square card, pictured below, came with this set, and I think the pencil handwriting is that of my father-in-law) and then a gold-trimmed set that my parents gave me. Has there ever been a being in this world who has been heaped with more undeserved gifts than I have been heaped through not even 50 years yet? I’m not so sure. Thank you, parents and parents-in-law; thank you, Maestro Piastro, Longines Symphonette Recording Society and Holiday Choraliers; thank you, Brother and other participants in acoustical innovation over the years. Thank you, God, and merry Christmas, everyone.