I went to the mall yesterday and the music was so LOUD everywhere and a different song in every store PLUS out in rhe corridors. When DD and I went to eat lunch I went back to a booth as far as I could away from he door. What a relief for my ears. I love Christmas and the music but it's too soon. Every store is decked out and selling Christmas stuff. I sent to Macy's first while DD had a short appointment. It was supposed to be 10 minutes but he was behind and it lasted an hour and a half. I did a lot of walking around the mall yesterday! Macy's usually has many trees decorated in different themes but this year there were less than half of what they usually had. They usually have bins of the ornaments around the bottom of each tree but there weren't any this year. I heard a lady ask and the clerk said you just have to take them off the tree . . . there aren't any in the back. If you don't get what you want now you won't get any. Those trees are going to be bare soon. Christmas orniments are 40% off already. The stores don't want to have much left over after Christmas. That's pretty much how it is every year here in Hawaii. Everything sells out early and fast. Partly because most people have to mail their gifts to the mainland or overseas.

I loved it--listened to it twice. I love Sarah Mclachian's voice. We have to remember Canada had their Thanksgiving last month--very sensible, IMHO. I probably will be tired of it before Christmas but it sure sounded nice tonight.

I checked around the interwebs and found conflicting info, but most agree with this album review for A Charlie Brown Christmas from AllMusic.com: Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz called on pianist extraordinaire Vince Guaraldi and his trio to compose and perform music that would reflect the humor, charm, and innocence of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the entire Peanuts gang for their 1965 Christmas TV special. It was a perfect match: Guaraldi strings together elegant, enticing arrangements that reflect the spirit and mood of Schulz's work and introduce contemporary jazz to youngsters with grace, charm, and creativity." The Wikipedia entry for Vince Guaraldi has it like this: "While searching for just the right music to accompany a planned Peanuts television documentary, Lee Mendelson (the producer of the special) heard "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" by Vince Guaraldi's trio on the radio while traveling in a taxicab on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California. Mendelson contacted Ralph J. Gleason, jazz columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and was put in touch with Guaraldi. He proposed that Guaraldi score the upcoming Peanuts Christmas special and Guaraldi enthusiastically took the job, performing a version of what became "Linus and Lucy" over the phone two weeks later." The planned Peanuts documentary never aired, but the music Guaraldi prepared impressed Shultz, who was working on "A Charlie Brown Christmas" around that time, and Guaraldi was tapped to provide the musical soundtrack, beginning work on a set of Christmas songs for the show. Later in 1964 he put out an album called "Jazz Impressions of A Boy Named Charlie Brown", which included the first appearance of "Linus and Lucy". A year later, the same recording was used for the TV special and its soundtrack album. So it's not clear whether "Linus and Lucy" was originally intended to be a Christmas song, but it was clearly written for use on a Peanuts TV special at the behest of Schulz, either directly, or indirectly through his TV producers.

"In the meadow we can built a snowman, and pretend that he is Justice of the Peace Brown. He'll say 'are you joined in legal union', We'll say 'no man, but you can do the job when you're in town'..." Or do you prefer the religious version ;-) But really, Winter Wonderland -- I agree with what I think (I might be wrong) you said earlier -- is a song unlikely to offend a person of normal religious or un-religious sensibility. It's rightly popular at holiday time for obvious reasons: how lovely to share in the happiness of a young couple in love and looking forward to sharing their life together. The Corb Lund song about growing older, outliving friends, being left out of your kid's holiday plans ... I doubt it will ever achieve even a fraction of Winter Wonderland's popularity. But as I grow older, I don't mind pondering the resilient old man and his animals. It makes me glad my own dad is still here, still close enough, to visit with. I've clicked on many of the links to songs above and have enjoyed them all.