The Twelve Songs of Christmas

Christmas is coming…I would like to celebrate it in the sensibility that has been my secret and secluded habitat… it has always been a time of reflection and renewal… I have always had two Renaissances: September and Winter Solstice.. a spiritual awareness and consciousness invades my Being…a Beingness becomes me and for a moment I am connected to the Entanglement…and I am everywhere and always for a slight sliver of Infinity…of foreverness…

Over the years, I have written Christmas/Solstice Songs to send to friends during the holidays. We found 12 of these songs that now have been arranged and collected into a Christmas Album: THE TWELVE SONGS OF CHRISTMAS.

A New Christmas

This Is A Season To Remember

Happy Yuletide, Lovers

Sing We Now

Maybe It Is Christmas

The Kind Of Christmas

The Season Of Our Dreams

Will You Be Home For Christmas

Solstice Song

Christmas Time

Merry Christmas To You

Another Year

As I indicated earlier, every winter solstice has always served as an artistic renaissance for me. Sparking this renaissance this year has been the genius of creative arranger and producer Rainer Raisch, his marvelous studio, his Dreamland Orchestra and Singers, and the warmth and presence of the soloist Marie Luise Lutz. Raisch manages to uncover musical motifs specific to each song and expand them, so they unfold as a tapestry of musical expression.

Enabling this process has been my friend and colleague, Dr. Ulrich Hartung, who has encouraged and supported my work for many years, and was responsible for connecting me with Rainer Raisch.

We will soon release the songs on streaming services, for each of the twelve days of Christmas, and then as an Album.

DIMENSIONS OF DIMINISHMENT

Time to take a moment to reflect on aspects of mortality that I haven't considered before. I am already exceeding the lifespan of male members of my family going back a century or so. For the past few years I have found myself focused on the moment, and have found energy to extend these moments by noticing and creating objects of awareness that vivify Being in Time. This somehow seems remotely connected to Martin Heiddeger's opus magnum, Being and Time and a later final lecture, Time and Being.

But my reflection encounters a different arena, one that counters an expanding universe with its opposite process, a diminishing content that tugs at at the heartstrings of a universe seemingly out of control and plunging recklessly into an infinite abyss.

My perception might be that of peering through a glass darkly at infinite regression, a diminishment, if you will. Well, a diminishment, even if you won't. It is perhaps a little like the "incredible shrinking man," but has more to do with the mass of intelligence, which seemed immeasurable when I last thought about it. But as I looked at the implications of the entanglement overcoming infinity, I began to understand that it is all quantifiable to an infinite degree, and the nature of infinity is that it is complete+...complete-.

So I seem to be on the brink of Diminishment... which has the look of disappearing, until you realize Diminishment is Infinite, and I only appear to be disappearing. We are the infinite reflections of the jewel of diminishment... cultures have expressed these jewels as mandala. Maybe I'm becoming a Mandala, a singing of myself as a jewel spinning like a comet across the night sky.

Making Time

Time always remembers
Important moments…
Some glowing embers,
Or feelings so intense…
We are suddenly changed—-
Discovering we feel
Our destiny rearranged.
We discover we are real
And made of Dreams
And Love and Joy…
Entangled so it seems,
And nothing can destroy
Our connected awareness
Expanding forever
As universal fairness…
And isn’t it clever
That actually we are Time?
We are the ticking of the Toc
The makers of the rhyme,
The rhythm of the clock.
We are the stuff that make
Moments to remember,
And the dreams that take
Us past September.
October withers us away…
December slithers into night…
I still have songs to play
Before my final flight.

WINTER ME A SOLSTICE SONG

As I was growing up, I discovered the beauty of Christmas was its connection to winter solstice and the triumph of light over darkness. 

As the years passed, I wrote poetry in blank books as I walked through cities and visited coffee houses and bars. My most prolific times were autumn days as they passed into winter.

I was composing songs as part of my process…often for some distant, unattainable love… this was part of my psyche, and in recent years I discovered that this distant longing is a condition known as “limerance.”

My obsessions changed slightly as I chose to enter higher education to pursue how music could be a force for change. As the years passed, so many students and colleagues and students went into the world.
Christmas became a time to reconnect with all those who impacted my life as students and colleagues. 

I began writing Christmas/Soltice Songs when my mother came to visit me the Christmas after my father died. The first song was written for her, “A New Christmas.” I sent the song as a Christmas greeting to friends and colleagues. I continued to write a solstice song each year and sent to friends and colleagues. 

We managed to find twelve of the songs. There were a few more, but they disappeared into the vaults of forgotten past improvisations. In my adolescence, I was known as an endless improviser… and improvisations became compositions.

These Winter Solstice Christmas songs focus on the beauty and suspense of winter solstice… for me the essence of Christmas are a continuation of the ancient the Stonehenge vigils that began more than five thousand years ago, waiting for the sun to appear after the longest night… assuring us that life is renewed in a new cycle. 

Unfortunately, I haven't found all the Christmas Songs, as I had several computer crashes where I lost data I was not able to recover.

Here is a list of the songs recovered. The dates are speculative. I know "A New Christmas" was 1989. My son, Russell, was nine, and he was born in 1980. 

Here is a list of recovered songs. The dates are speculative.

A New Christmas 1989
Happy Yuletide, Lovers 1990
Merry Christmas to You 1991
Sing We Now 2011
Maybe It’s Christmas 2012
The Kind of Christmas 2013
Just Another Year (2014?)
This Is the Season to Remember 2015
Solstice Song 2016
Christmastime 2017
Will You Be Home for Christmas 2022

Tradition  passes the power of life to generations…and a time for remembering our friends and loves became a source for continuing to celebrate the beauty of who we are to each other. These songs exist because I have been blessed by the friendship of so many around the world. 

Winter Solstice has always been a source for celebrating the renewal of life…at least that has been my reality, and I thank so many brilliant and talented friends and artists who are helping to share these songs with a wider audience.  

Somehow a phrase came to mind that might be a song in itself. The phrase is "Winter me...Winter me a solstice song..."