Yuletide Fare (or Faire)

We worked once at a radio station that had a fast rule regarding Christmas music: none to be aired until December 15. And we attended a church where the priest was stricter than that--no carols until midnight mass, when Christmas Eve turned into Christmas Day.

With those thoughts in mind, we move on to this department's not-so-strict recommendations for pre-Christmas (i.e., Advent) reading, viewing and listening.

It wouldn't seem proper to go thru the season without re-reading "A Christmas Carol." There is a handsome Modern Library edition containing this and two less familiar Dickens Christmas stories: "The Chimes" and "The Haunted Man." It carries an introduction by John Irving, who tells us that Dickens, in a preface to the 1843 edition, wrote "I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me."

Other choices for bedtime reading, neither well-known, but greatly rewarding: "A Likely Story," by Donald Westlake, about a hack writer attempting to produce the ultimate Christmas coffee table book, and Somerset Maugham's "Christmas Holiday," set in Paris, and truly conjuring an emotionally bleak midwinter.

Christmas listening (unless you have rules about this): Bach's "Christmas Oratorio," of course--but also "Sleighride" by an Art Pepper-Richie Cole quintet, with Roger Kellaway on the keys. The saxophonists take their sleigh on some very crazy but happy leaps. And, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" by Dexter Gordon--not as poignant as the Garland original, but a cheerier, lightly swinging version, the audio equivalent of a mug of mulled wine.

And finally, viewing. Only two choices for us--the Alastair Sim film of "A Christmas Carol " (which John Irving remembers watching in northwest India while traveling with the Great Royal Circus) and Bill Murray's "Scrooged," which offers, among other Christmas treats, Miles Davis busking as a street musician.   "A Christmas Carol" and "Scrooged"--bookends.

And now, thinking of mulled wine...