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| Photo by me, December 2024. |
The evenings are the time of day I love the most in the winter. The sunset is early, by five thirty, in the first part of December and there is a cozy feeling about it. The nights are longer than the days and it is fun to count up the hours that are spent below freezing. During cold spells even this far south we can spend more hours in a day below freezing than above. During true Arctic outbreaks there are days when it never climbs above freezing even with the brightest sun.
I love cold weather, I feel more alive when it slaps me in the face and I can wear a heavy wool coat and a scarf. I enjoy watching the last of the light fade into the west from my kitchen windows and feeling tucked away inside the house. I am not out much in the night anymore, my eyesight is too poor for night driving even with glasses. It makes me feel older than I am, but I like looking out on the descending darkness from inside. So many times I have had to cut an activity short or end visiting with someone to beat the darkness home.
Tuesday evening with temperatures in the thirties I listened to an old friend, George Winston's December album. It enters my mind this time of year, every year, with the blurred Christmas lights, frosty ground and chilled red noses. I feel the cold and peacefulness just from looking at the simple and sophisticated early 80s cover. The music is not all that challenging for classical music, but it need not be. It is possible to listen to music as it is to look at art or read a novel for the simple reasons of joy and pleasure. Not everything has to be a chore or be viewed with a critical filter as is all too common today as if everybody is an expert or academic or a wannabe critic.
I tried to remember when I first heard George Winston's December album. It would have been in the early 80s when it was released in 1982 as this music seems to have always been with me, but I cannot pinpoint a specific memory. Maybe it was in a gifted class or riding with my father in his Cadillac and this played on Peach FM 95 Atlanta? I would like to think that I can remember everything, but that is impossible. It seems doubly impossible that an album of pastoral piano solos would reach number fifty-four on the Billboard charts or sell three million copies, but December did. It was a different time when instrumental music had a place on the radio and perhaps the American populace was less regimented in its listening choices. I was nine years old at the time and I remember that I listened to or heard all genres of music, but maybe my family and childhood were exceptional in that regard and I cannot project that onto the country as a whole.
My favorite piece from the album would be the Variations on the Kanon which refers to Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D. It is a more jaunty arrangement than the overly sentimental Jean-Francois Paillard arrangement that was popularized in the 1980 film Ordinary People. I love that film, relate to much of it, and think Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hirsch and Timothy Hutton were outstanding in it - but not that version of Canon in D.
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| Timothy Hutton and Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People |
That film got so much right from the again "simple and sophisticated" clothes with a neutral palette that my mother wore and which appeared briefly in the U.S. from the late seventies into the early eighties before bold colors took over, the styling, the acting and Timothy Hutton was epically adorable and I knew that at seven years old. Except the music...I have gotten far, far off the path of where I began and damn if I cannot help myself against the beauty of Hutton in that film.
But one more photo of Timothy Hutton stretched out on a bed and in a well made sweater back when sweaters were thick, worth the money and made in the U.S.A. Yes, sweaters are not what they used to be, just like music, and you can read about why that is here. The last high quality sweater I can remember buying in an average department store was in the early nineties.
Back to December and 2024.
I still listen to this album in the winter and not just at Christmas, but into early March when the trees are bare, nights can be cold, there is the slimmest possibility of snow and the sun sets early. Piano solos may not chart anymore on Billboard, sweaters and movies are not as good as they were, Timothy Hutton and I have both aged, I cannot see at night, but I can still enjoy the fading winter light and December. The times and tastes have changed, but there are classics around as simple as a winter evening to enjoy. Seek them out and cherish them.
George Winston died in the summer of 2023.
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