Christmas Carols - Day 17 - Holiday Haiku Challenge
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Welcome to Day 17 of our Holiday Haiku Challenge
Today's guest is Alle McCloskey from Finding Eden Media. Alle's day-to-day is filled with old children’s books, large doses of refrigerator art, life-giving music and the world’s best cuddles from her two favorite little people. She prays that by infusing her messy-but-beautiful nest with worship and creativity, they too will learn to become followers of the King. Passionate to see the online conversation filled with the redemptive work of Jesus, she and her husband document the creative journey of brand building and story crafting at Finding Eden Media — where they blend work and play as a freelance family! You can also connect with them over on Instagram — their favorite place to socialize and share online!
Today's Challenge is to create a haiku based on the inspiration of...
Christmas Carols
Perhaps you could select your favorite carol as the centerpiece of your writing, or head in a more general sense of how these Christmas songs find a place in your holiday traditions!
Christmas Carols
by Alle McCloskey
This past February, my Valentine surprised me with a portable record player and now our entire family has caught the vinyl bug! We look for new records to add to our collection everywhere we go — consignment shops, thrift stores, specialty record spots, and amazon are some of our favorites!
Our boys’ favorite record is called, Spectacular Space Hits and features themes from Star Wars, Superman, Star Trek, and more. As a result they can now sing Darth Vader’s Theme, the Cantina Band Theme, and Yoda’s Theme from memory. It’s become a bit of a bargaining chip in our home and I can always count on some good cleaning if I put this record on, so thanks for that John Williams!
With the holiday season upon us, we have been so excited to hunt for vintage Christmas records and so far, we’ve lucked out! We found this Christmas with Conniff album featuring the Ray Conniff Singers along that is getting a lot of airtime in our home.
And we also landed some compilation albums that have music from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Andy Williams, Bing Crosby, Julie Andrews, and Nat King Cole, to name a few. We’ve even started listening to a four-album set of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Ballet, but perhaps my favorite is the Merry Wurlitzer Christmas record we found at the thrift store — it makes me giggle every time we play it!
This month, I’ve tried to be intentional in the way I create and influence our home atmosphere. By targeting a few of the senses, I’ve found that I can directly impact the natural tone and mood of our family. A disheveled, crazy home makes for stressed out, unhappy people inside it. You can read more about how I’m focusing on the senses of sight and scent to foster calm and peace in our home over here (we even have a coupon code for some beautiful Christmas prints over there), but perhaps the easiest and quickest way to push the reset button in our home is through sound — specifically with music.
We’re a family of musicians, so understandably music plays a huge part in our day-to-day life — whether being played and shared live with our instruments or flowing through our speakers as a record or Spotify playlist. At Christmastime, it’s become such a natural way to impact the entire home with melodies that can calm, excite, or even inspire reflection on the real reason why we celebrate during this season. Traditional carols bring back sweet memories and carry on traditions from one generation to the next while new holiday favorites breath a new life and freshness into the season!
Sometimes, I’ll turn on some upbeat holiday tunes for a quick dance party when we need to get some extra wiggles out. Other times, we’ll pull out the Christmas books for a much-needed, restful break and we’ll be accompanied by some soft Christmas carols. It’s these small touches that are easy to overlook, but that can have such an incredible impact on your home if used with intention and love!
To help you build out your own Christmas music collection, we’d like to share a Spotify playlist we’ve created exclusively for Wendy’s holiday haiku challenge participants! Check it out below!
https://open.spotify.com/user/1265210505/playlist/2BLAyf2GXrbtQnWsk6wGgW
