Jolly Old Nicholas

Today is December 5, which is St Nicholas Day.  The only reason I know this is because I fell in love with a recording of the St. Nicholas Mass by Josef Hayden way back when I was a wee bairn of a soldier in Heidelberg Germany.  It was on a vinyl record which I checked out of the enlisted men’s service center and I recorded it onto a cassette—cassette!!!—and played the darn thing through the rest of my enlistment, through Europe, through my BA, through art school, through a whole marriage, through grad school, took it with me up the corporate ladder of an insurance company in Boston—until it went berserk and unraveled, hissed then spit itself out of my outdated machine—kind of paralleling my own downward trajectory.   It was listed in the Swan catalogue but it was out of print or whatever the terminology is for recordings and I could never find it again.  I have another recording of the mass, but it’s not as good, that is, it doesn’t feature the Vienna Boys Choir and it wasn’t recorded in Austria, which, I’m sorry, but that’s where it has to be recorded. For god’s sake, we’re talking Hayden here! St. Nicholas is out of favor now, too, I notice.  Everyone decorates with snowmen.  I suspect—and I have inside information on this—that fundamentalist Christians thought St. Nick was taking attention away from The Birth or maybe it was that Nick is another name for the wicked one.  Now if a spaceman from another universe was to come to our planet during Christmas she would think we worship snowmen, so what was gained here folks?  Snowmen don’t give you presents, by the way, so that’s my first knock against them. They are self-absorbed a*h*s.  Snowmen melt and go away unlike St. Nick who labors all year making toys besides relentlessly gathering intelligence on children’s behavior—actually, now that I think about it, it’s kind of like the NSA.  Anyway and nonetheless, today I went up the attic and pulled out all my St. Nicks, Santa Clauses, Kris Kringles and festooned the place with them, sat down in front of the roaring space heater and closed my eyes and I’ll be damned if didn’t hear the Vienna Boys Choir singing the Gloria 

(Pic thanks to New Zealand Woman's Weekly)