(I found this image - with helpful safety tips - here.)
My mother, who is German, tells me that, when she was a child, in pre-World War II Germany, they would put candles on the Christmas tree. Even though I was a child, my first thought was "Holy shit! Wouldn't the tree catch fire & burn the whole fucking house down?!" & I was very happy that, though the electric lights on our tree got a little warm, they weren't a freakin' open flame.
My wife, who has Polish parents, tells me she heard the same thing from them. What they told her - & what my mother wouldn't, because the past is pretty rosy in her hindsight twenty-twenty - is that, yes, there were fires on the tree. All the time. All the time! It was a thing that happened, because, you know, they were putting candles on a flammable object. Of course there were fires!
Having said that, I think I would enjoy watching a Christmas tree burn. Not in a house, with presents under it - that would be sad! I'm not a psychopath. But I can't stop looking at that image up there. I like fires, I'm human. One of our neighbors keeps promising to invite us to a bonfire. I wonder when that's going to happen?
None of this has anything to do with this week's show, with is full of Christmas music both traditional & odd, both reverent & the opposite, but hopefully nice & novel & different than the canned stuff you hear in all the places you go this time of year. I don't want to do the same sort of Christmas show everyone else does. But perhaps it's my vanity saying that - I have a sneaking suspicion I'm not all that special, you know.
The show is on here in unseasonably warm Lexington from 4-6pm on 88.1 fm (that's WRFL) & all over the unseasonably warm Christmas world on wrfl dot fm. I hope you can tune in, but in case you can't, I'll archive it on the show's website in time for Christmas!
Ho ho ho!
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