12 posts tagged “xmas”

What's the best gift you received this year?

Well I didn't get it until today, the day after Christmas, but the best gift I got was broadband wireless internet from Clearwire.  After weeks months of debate and years of dial-up internet my parents finally bit the bullet and signed up for fast internet.  And oh my gosh it's so nice.  It'll be especially nice when I have to move back home in March to do my student teaching.  Since my parents have yet to get cable I'll now be able to stay up-to-date with all the cable shows I watch.  That is, if any new shows are being made and aired by then.

Still no new mp3 player.  I called Creative Labs today and the person I talked to said they aren't making the one I want anymore so it looks like I'll be ordering myself an 80 GB Zune.  I knew I should have ordered the Zen Vision W when I had the chance.

Share your favorite holiday song.

Show us what you hope Santa brings you.

USA is showing a "Psych" holiday special tonight at 10 PM.  To get you in the mood for it here are a couple holiday "Psych Outs":

About 5 years ago CBC aired a Christmas special called "The True Meaning of Christmas Specials" directed by, produced by, and starring Dave Foley.  It had cameos by Mike Myers, Jason Priestly, Elvis Stojko, and more Canadians.  My favorite bit out of the whole show, the one I can still remember clearly, was when Dave Foley played David Bowie against Joe Flaherty's Bing Crosby.  It was great.  They even had "Bowie" tell "Bing" that his name is pronounced "Bowie" not "Booie".  My problem now is, I can't seem to find a clip of it.  They showed on CBC for a couple years every Christmas but then the year I was going to tape it for a friend of mine who loves Bowie, they didn't show it.  I've searched everywhere for a clip (YouTube, Veoh, Daily Motion, even some not so legal sites) but I can't seem to find one.  It's not even out on DVD in Canada (or anywhere for that matter) otherwise I would buy it up in a second.  So since I can't seem to find the Dave Foley clip, you get to see the original David Bowie/Bing Crosby performance.  Still a good clip but I would have love to have shown you the other one too.

Audio: What's your favorite carol or holiday song?

I couldn't pick just one so you get a whole bunch.

I'm sure my 'hood is sick & tired of me posting about this song but it really is one of my favorites:

An oldie but goodie:
A couple by Weird Al:
A couple by Stan Boreson:
Vox doesn't support .wma format so I had to upload this one to box.net: "Sometimes You Have to Work on Christmas (Sometimes)" by Harvey Danger

Can you tell I like non-traditional holiday songs?

It's 2 for the price of 1 this week because by the time next Monday rolls around I'll be working on dial-up.  Ick.  So MVM is going to go on hiatus until at least the New Year.  But it's not next week yet so on to this week's videos.

First up is the video for "Christmas Is All Around" from the movie "Love Actually".  I had my annual viewing of the movie this weekend and I was both surprised & pleased to see they'd actually made a video for the song.  Enjoy!

Bonus video: "Christmas Is Here" by Bearforce1.  I really can't describe this video; you'll just have to watch it yourself.

I was listening to the Barenaked Ladies' version of "Jingle Bells" (hear below) and in it they sing the version you always sung as kid - you know, "Jingle bells/Batman smells/Robin laid an egg/Batmobile lost a wheel and Joker got away".  While they were singing that bit I remembered that a have a shirt from Threadless.com about the last line:

I can't believe I forgot about that shirt.  I hope I have it here at my apartment since it's the perfect time of year to wear it.

Anyway, here's the Barenaked Ladies song:

After a fairly typical Thanksgiving (fighting with my sister, food, procrastinating on homework) I'm back at school and not looking forward to this last week of classes.  However, it's after Thanksgiving so I am now officially in the Christmas spirit.  I started listening to Christmas music the day after Thanksgiving and I have yet to stop (I have 1.42 gigs of Christmas music on my computer - I think it'll last me for the next month).

One of my family's Christmas traditions is to go downtown and just wander around.  Like the Pigs on Parade in the summer, there's a Nutcracker March during the holiday season which benefits Northwest Center.  We weren't able to find all the nutcrackers during our trip yesterday but below are the ones we did see.  (I'm planning on going back in a few weeks to try and find some more.)

(I apologize for the nutcrackers being slightly off center in the pictures.  My camera always takes a picture that's slightly off from what's in the viewer and I always forget to adjust it.  Oh, and that one nutcracker is being a chain door because the bus tunnel was closed.  I'll have to go down during the week sometime to get a better picture.)

While we're downtown during the holiday season, we also like to stop by the Sheraton Hotel and check out the gingerbread village they host every year (this benefits the Northwest chapter of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation).  This year's theme was, I believe, Christmas around the world.  Or something like that - I was never able to figure out the exact theme.

I normally try to stay away from Christmas music until after Thanksgiving but I just got another comment on the song so I figured I'd do a general post about it.  (Also, I googled it and my Vox comes up 9th out of the first 10 Google hits.)

If you would like to purchase a copy of "Stop the Cavalry" as performed by the Cory Band with the Gwalia Singers, you can do so here at Silver Platters.  Silver Platters is a great Seattle-based music store and this is the second year in a row I've bought hard to find Christmas music there.  (This year it was Stan Boreson's two Christmas albums.)

And even though it's not after Thanksgiving yet I'll put "Stop the Cavalry" in this post just in case you haven't heard it yet.