{"id":4151,"date":"2007-12-24T22:35:26","date_gmt":"2007-12-25T06:35:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2007\/12\/24\/christmas-eve-nostalgia\/"},"modified":"2019-12-23T08:46:33","modified_gmt":"2019-12-23T16:46:33","slug":"christmas-eve-nostalgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2007\/12\/24\/christmas-eve-nostalgia\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas Eve Nostalgia"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='__iawmlf-post-loop-links' style='display:none;' data-iawmlf-post-links='[{&quot;id&quot;:5679,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.sweet-music.com\\\/Merchant4\\\/store_SM.mvc?p=XXSU-SAS-CDr&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/www.sweet-music.com\\\/Merchant4\\\/store_SM.mvc?p=XXSU-SAS-CDr&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:5680,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/madphilosopher.ca\\\/2004\\\/12\\\/sunshine-and-snowflakes&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20250802133643\\\/https:\\\/\\\/madphilosopher.ca\\\/2004\\\/12\\\/sunshine-and-snowflakes\\\/&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-08 13:30:15&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-24 20:16:48&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-05 01:55:00&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200}],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-05 01:55:00&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;}]'><\/div>\n<p>Just about everyone has their own favorite Christmas album. Prairie got a copy of her family&#8217;s traditional music and started playing it today &#8212; Peter, Paul and Mary&#8217;s &#8216;A Holiday Celebration&#8217; &#8212; and it got me thinking about my own, long-lost personal favorite. For years, there was one particular album that I&#8217;d dig out every Christmas and put on the record player&#8230;however, it&#8217;s been ages since I&#8217;ve heard it, and while I would occasionally get snippets of the songs floating through my head, or brief flashes of the cover art, I haven&#8217;t been able to pull the actual title of the album out of my brain in years.<\/p>\n<p>Chatting with Prairie tonight about it, though, the word &#8216;sunshine&#8217; popped out of my head, which seemed to jibe with the hazy memory of a rising sun on the cover, so I tossed &#8216;sunshine christmas album&#8217; at Google. I wasn&#8217;t really expecting to get a useful hit, but lo and behold, the third major link caught my eye &#8212; an (apparently unauthorized) bootleg of &#8216;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.sweet-music.com\/Merchant4\/store_SM.mvc?p=XXSU-SAS-CDr\" title=\"Sweet-Music: Sunshine and Snowflakes\">Sunshine and Snowflakes: 40 Kids Singing at Christmas<\/a>&#8216;. Bingo &#8212; the right title, the right cover art, and the titles of the songs looked right&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p>This was promising, but it still didn&#8217;t let me actually <em>listen<\/em> to the album. So, one more trip to Google, now that I actually had the official title&#8230;and once again, success! A 2004 <a href=\"http:\/\/madphilosopher.ca\/2004\/12\/sunshine-and-snowflakes\/\" title=\"The Mad Philosopher: Sunshine and Snowflakes: Free MP3 Download\">weblog post by the Mad Philosopher<\/a> had the entire album posted as .mp3 files, complete with cover art. Immediately I downloaded the files, tossed them into iTunes, and called Prairie into the room to listen.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/madphilosopher.ca\/2004\/12\/sunshine-and-snowflakes\/\" title=\"The Mad Philosopher: Sunshine and Snowflakes: Free MP3 Download\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" id=\"image4152\" src=\"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/12\/sunshine_and_snowflakes_cover_thumb.jpg\" alt=\"Sunshine and Snowflakes cover\" width=\"200\" height=\"202\" align=\"right\" \/><\/a>Finally being able to hear this again is <em>great<\/em>. Prairie&#8217;s been enjoying it, and I&#8217;m amazed at just how much I&#8217;m remembering, almost as if it was just last Christmas that I was pulling the record out of its sleeve, putting it on dad&#8217;s record player, and carefully lowering the needle onto the vinyl. And while I&#8217;m sure there&#8217;s a lot of nostalgia wrapped up in this, the music is <em>fun<\/em> &#8212; a very, <em>very<\/em> 70&#8217;s funk\/rock medley of traditional songs on side one, and five original tracks, three of which are nice and pretty, but two of which are the two that I <em>really<\/em> remember being fond of (&#8220;Wise Men Still Adore Him&#8221; and &#8220;Happy Birthday, Baby Jesus&#8221;).<\/p>\n<p>So for me, this is a perfect Christmas Eve present. I get to revisit part of my childhood with some good old music, Prairie&#8217;s enjoying hearing the songs (and watching me bounce around as I remember bits and pieces of them), and I get some more <em>good<\/em> Christmas music to add to our collection.<\/p>\n<p>Now, off to bed. After all, if I don&#8217;t go to bed, Santa won&#8217;t stop by&#8230;and that would be a sad, sad thing indeed!<\/p>\n<p>Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Merry Solstice&#8230;pick your holiday, call it what you will, just have a good one!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So for me, this is a perfect Christmas Eve present. I get to revisit part of my childhood with some good old music, Prairie&#8217;s enjoying hearing the songs (and watching me bounce around as I remember bits and pieces of them), and I get some more _good_ Christmas music to add to our collection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2035,2043],"tags":[13,80],"class_list":["post-4151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-personal","tag-life","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}