away on a tangent

I read that there were some weather problems in other places, but you wouldn't know it here. It was dry and sunny and, for the season, unusually warm as we drove to our niece's home for the family gathering. The only out-of-towners were B's eldest sister and her husband who avoided the snow on the mountains between Reno and here by flying over them.

We had a white elephant gift exchange, which this year was limited to edibles, so for once I participated. I gave a collection of Pepperidge Farm Christmas cookies packages, and got some dried fruit, only some of which I can eat, and that slowly and cautiously. B. got some chocolate and caramel popcorn, which she kept encouraging others to steal (a provision in the rules), but nobody did. I suppose I could have, but it was coming home with us anyway.

Something I wasn't expecting showed up in the household background music, a rock version of "The Little Drummer Boy." I don't know who did it, and on attempting to look for it online later I found there's a lot of them. If it wasn't this one it at least sounded a lot like it.

"Little Drummer Boy" is a much-loathed carol but I actually like it. (Despite not being a Christian, most of the ones I dislike tend to be secular, like "Here Comes Santa Claus.") I even like it in a rocked-up arrangement, though that ought to surprise me, as I spent most of my youth, the age when most of my peers listened to the stuff, utterly loathing rock music. I finally found some that I liked when I heard Steeleye Span's arrangements of English folk songs, which suggests that the real reason I hated rock music is because most of the songs sucked, and what I needed were some good ones.

Which reminds me that another song everybody hates except me is "It's a Small World." That was one of the Sherman brothers' Disney songs, which in turn reminds me that I watched a documentary on the brothers on Disney+. This weirdly overemphasized their differences and disagreements, so that you wouldn't realize that they kept on collaborating on songs even at the time that the documentary would have you believe they weren't speaking to each other.

I like a lot of the Sherman songs, especially those for Mary Poppins, but there are two I do purely hate the way that others hate "Small World." One of them is the Winnie-the-Pooh theme song, which is nauseatingly cutesy, and the other is "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow," which has the demerit of a catchy tune combined with sententious lyrics. "Man has a dream, and that's a start / He follows his dream with mind and heart / And when it becomes a reality / It's a dream come true for you and me." That's disturbingly unspecific. What if that dream is some industrial process which may produce a useful product but destroys the environment? And, uh, what about Hitler? There was a guy who sure had a dream, and unquestionably followed it with mind and heart, so that recipe is not necessarily a good thing, is it?

And a boisterous Boxing Day to you, too.