"It's Christmas time in the city..."

Governor Lynch of the good ol' Granite State may not be the greatest governor, but he sure can conduct. Well, OK, he can't really, but he sure knows how to try! Yes, I have seen John Lynch try his hand at conducting a full orchestra. Those of you who don't believe me can read Bria's blog and those of you that have already read her blog already do believe me, so I guess I'm pretty well covered. The fact is, Gov. John Lynch was invited by the New Hampshire Philharmonic to try his hand at conducting "Jingle Bells Forever" in front of a large audience: a nicely packed Palace Theatre-full of people. (By the way, did you know that John Lynch and his wife have attended the Palace Theatre since 1975?!?!?! Why, that's before I was born! It's before Bria was born! It's before Lisa was born! It's before Derrick, Chad, Lindsay....) Our illustrious governor agreed, and sure enough, he tried. But he did little more than that. He kept the beat almost perfectly, I must admit, but he occassionally seemed to get tired and would hardly move his hands until a sudden crash of a symbol would send his body back into convulsions (well, ok, that's a gross exaggeration).

On the whole, I enjoyed the whole concert quite thoroughly. The evening started off with a merry .... actually, I can never remember the name but it's the one that goes, "Outside the snow is falling and friends are calling, 'Yoohoo!' Come on, it's lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with you!" After a couple pieces featuring the winner of the NH Philharmonic's youth competition as a soloist, the first half ended with some of Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker Suite." The second half started with something like "Brazilian Sleigh Bells" then went into a medley of American Christmas songs ("White Christmas", "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town", etc.) I think my favorite part of the night was either the American medley or the carol sing-along that came after it. The sing-along was at least one of the top two best parts of the night, although some of the orchestra's intros were a bit hard to follow, and some people came in in the wrong place. It was especially enjoyable to hear so many people singing "Joy to the world! The Savior reigns!" and going right through the first verses of four or five other Christmas songs that contain such obviously Christian lyrics.

Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the songs played on the radio. Bria scanned throught the FM channels on the way home, hoping to find some good Christmas music to listen to. We listened to -- and enjoyed-- a fifties-ish rendition of "Here Comes Santa Claus." Then that station turned to rock, so we tried another channel. That channel was playing "Here Comes Santa Claus." It was fairly near the end, but we turned the radion off anyway because of the obnoxious voices of the singers. That radio station was playing songs by request, and apparently someone had requested "Here Comes Santa Claus", because the exact same rendition of that song was just starting when we turned the radio back on. We scanned again, and what should the next Christmas channel be playing but...."Here Comes Santa Claus!" Aaaaarrrrrrgh! We finally found a couple other songs, but the total count of songs we had listened to when we got home was still something like this: "Jingle Bells": 1; "White Christmas": 1; "Here Comes Santa Claus": 5.


P.s. In case anyone doesn't check the comments below, and would like to know who wrote "The Melancholy Pig", the answer is Lewis Carroll.