Friday Find: Holiday Music: It's full of food

This is kind of a cop-out on a Friday Find, but I am just SO EXCITED that this season is officially upon us! This is a post I wrote and originally posted on FoodLush a few years ago. I've edited and modified it.

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Thanksgiving is over! It's time to be unapologetically full of THE OTHER HOLIDAYS. 

I have an obsession with Christmas, and Christmas music, and Christmas food, and also regular food. And maybe you've noticed, but they overlap. In the obvious ways, sure, but have you noticed how often food is sung about in holiday songs? Because I have and I want to talk about it.

Let's examine some favorites shall we?

1. Sleigh Ride. 

Obviously the only good version is sung by Johnny Mathis. Give it a listen and just try not to feel jaunty and festive. Personally, it makes me want to dance like Kristen Wiig, which is high praise in my book.

If you've never heard Johnny Mathis's Christmas albums, get thee to iTunes and get thee some of that retro crooning. It's perfect.

My favorite part of the song is where they talk about passing around the coffee and the pumpkin pie.

a) Pumpkin pie is delicious (so is coffee) and b) It seems kind of rebellious as pumpkin pie is clearly a fall food, not a Christmas food. When I hear that lyric, I always wonder if people do eat pumpkin pie at their winter celebrations post-Thanksgiving. Do you? It certainly would seem that Johnny is in good company, given that pumpkin pie is also mentioned in Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree.

2. My Favorite Things.

I am partial to the Barbra Streisand version on her Christmas album, which is aptly titled "A Christmas Album". I didn't know this was a Christmas song, but it must be if it's on that album. Here we have crisp apple struedel, and schnitzel with noodle. 

Again I am confused. Apple struedel? Really? Admittedly I do not know how the Von Trapps and Fruelein Maria did things in Austria, but aren't apples more of a fall food? How DID this become a holiday song anyway? The lyrics also mention rain. As we all know, the only festive precipitation is snow, so I continute to be confused all around by this song. 

3. The Christmas Song.

Bold and daring, this song puts it all out there right in the title. This is THE Christmas song. Therefore I'm willing to accept at face-value anything it claims. The chesnuts are roasting on an open fire. "Everybody knows, a turkey and some mistletoe..." Bam. Suddenly turkey isn't just for Thanksgiving. 

4. The 12 Days of Christmas.

Pear trees, partridges, maids-a-milking, geese-a-laying. So many foodstuffs I can hardly count....count. Eh? Ehh?

5. We Wish You a Merry Christmas

Figgy Pudding! A fictitious Christmas food only available in classic Charles Dickens stories.

6. Baby It's Cold Outside. 

A problematic song featuring drinks, and a woman wondering what a man has put in her drink as he doesn't accept no for an answer. I hate this song. Every time I hear it I think, oh, it can't be THAT bad, then, nope, it just keeps getting worse. 

7. Let It Snow.

He or she brought some corn for popping! Festive!

8. Frosty the Snowman. 

He has a corncob pipe, so.

9. The Hannukah Song. 

There aren't many Hannukah songs, but this one is really in it to win it, with it's love for gin and tonics. There's also mention of the Carnegie Deli, and I think we can agree a pound of pastrami with a piece of bread perched precariously on top makes a damn good sandwich. 

10. Marshmallow World. 

The entire song revolves around corny food jokes. It's a marshmallow world, a whipped cream day. I get excited every time the Target commercial featuring this song is played.

11. Here We Come A-wassailing. 

According to Wikipedia, which quotes Readers Digest: "the Christmas spirit often made the rich a little more generous than usual, and bands of beggars and orphans used to dance their way through the snowy streets of England, offering to sing good cheer and to tell good fortune if the householder would give them a drink from his wassail bowl or a penny or a pork pie or, let them stand for a few minutes beside the warmth of his hearth. The wassail bowl itself was a hearty combination of hot ale or beer, apples, spices and mead, just alcoholic enough to warm tingling toes and fingers of the singers"

It doesn't get more festive than pork pies, warm spiced alcohol, and begging British street urchins. 

God bless us, every one. 

Five things

My sweet, tough, fellow gin-loving friend Hillary tagged me in a post, and challenged me to write five things that you may not know about me. I am a sucker for things like this, as you might have suspected. I am always bad at keeping track of what I've told to whom, though, so I have no idea if these are things you already know. At any rate, here goes.

1. I love food and cooking and all kinds of cuisines. But that wasn't always the case. Until I was about 15 (or maybe later, I'm not quite sure), I would pretty much only eat burgers in restaurants. Pasta or chicken fingers were fine, too, but I really didn't know what to do with myself if there wasn't a burger on a menu. The first time I went out for Thai food, I ordered some kind of grilled chicken and asked for it plain. I was totally missing out! Now I eat just about anything with glee. 

2. I was a big athlete as a kid. I played softball and basketball for years and years, and was completely obsessed with gymnastics up until I was 12 or 13. I did handstands and round-offs wherever I went. 

3. I love the first bite of anything triangular. Pie, pizza, cake: there is something beautiful and perfect about that first, perfect, triangular little bite (running out of adjectives here). My husband sometimes lets me have his, which is how you know this is true love. Needless to say, I'm thrilled that it's pie season.

4. When I was little, I was always cooking and experimenting. When I grew up I wanted to have a shop called Caitlin's Candy Corner. My mom would help me in the kitchen and my handy Dad would help me build all the shelves and display cases. It was a pretty solid business plan, if you ask me. 

5. When I was around 3, I told my Mom I wanted to learn another language. She's not sure where I got that idea, but she somehow found me some French language tapes (not bad for the suburban, pre-internet 80s). I don't remember that, exactly, but I do remember wishing I could talk to anyone, no matter what language they spoke, and spending time thinking about that. I also longed for a notebook (I didn't know that was what they wwere called), to write in. I kept opening my books, hoping they would somehow suddenly contain blank paper. They didn't, so I settled for scribbling in a Strawberry Shortcake book. I can't say that my love for languages, reading, and writing has changed much, though I no longer deface reading material. I majored in Spanish, studied abroad in Spain for a year, came home and started studying German (my brain had a very hard time switching from English to German without first stopping on Spanish. I might be the only native English speaker who spoke German with a Castillian accent.), and I came very close to going to a grad program for linguistics. I got in but didn't go, for various reasons, and now I'm here. Isn't it funny how we can trace some things back?

Friday Find: Serial Odds and Ends

I mentioned in a previous Friday Find that I am into the Serial podcast, like everyone else on the internet. I am actually in a Facebook discussion group with a bunch of sharp, astute people who make interesting points I never would have thought of. Yesterday I came across this link to charts for people obsessed with Serial, and had to share it there. And I want to share it with you too!

It's an ad for Best Buy! Photo from thebolditalic.com.

The thing with Serial is that it's interesting and fodder for a lot of discussion, but it's still about the murder of a teenager, and I don't want that diminished when I talk about it here. On that note, someone else also shared this poignant article about what Serial gets wrong, and the abysmal state of things in Baltimore at that time.

Photo from gawker.com.

Are you listening to Serial? I hear the Slate spoilers podcast (a podcast about a podcast!) is good, too.