Because the radio couldn’t pick up NPR in our basement, where I was wrapping Christmas packages, I was forced to search the dial for another station. When I came across one playing Christmas carols, I stopped. Without any snow, I need all the seasonal signals I can find to get into the holiday spirit.<\/p>\n
They were good, too: proper carols like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Adeste Fidelis,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as opposed to the more commercialized secular carols safe enough for shopping centers to blast at their customers. Not even dubious rock-n-roll versions, either, but old-school choral arrangements. So I uppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to find I was listening to a right-wing Christian station. Every fifteen minutes or so an announcer would come on to remind us to pray for the heathens in Libya, support US soldiers, distribute evangelical business cards, and similar blandishments that don’t match my<\/em> estimation of Christian virtues.<\/p>\n But periodic religious dumbassery is a small price to pay, I suppose, to preserve such fine music. Those songs belong to me as much as they do to fundamentalist Christians, but it seems corporate America isn’t prepared to do its part to preserve that portion of our cultural heritage. Too much potential for religious controversy and bad press, I suppose, but even more, no copyright fees. So unless these fine old songs are to become the exclusive property of religious extremism, more secular people like me are just going to have to sing Christmas carols more often.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Because the radio couldn’t pick up NPR in our basement, where I was wrapping Christmas packages, I was forced to search the dial for another station. When I came across one playing Christmas carols, I stopped. Without any snow, I need all the seasonal signals I can find to get into the holiday spirit. They […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}