Tag Archives: christmas

Glockenklang, Forever

Jacob (and Oliver too, somewhat) has taken quite the interest in Christmas music this year. Perhaps it’s singing in the choir at school, or perhaps it’s just him getting older, but in any case, Christmas music fascinates him.

And no song more than Jingle Bells. I have recordings of it by several artists in different styles, and he has his favorites and often wants to hear them – again and again.

The other night at supper, he said, “Dad, can you sing Jingle Bells in German?” Kind of a random question. I normally try to keep books and devices of all sorts away from the table, but my son had just asked me to sing. In German. I don’t believe that had ever happened before, so I wasn’t going to say no! I got my tablet, pulled up Google, and found some German lyrics. Not exactly a translation, but it fit the tune, so that’s what counts.

So I started singing, and when I got to the chorus, and sang Oh, Glockenklang, Glockenklang both boys bust up laughing. They thought Glockenklang was a hilarious word, and loved to hear it. Oliver requests I “sing Glockenklang” every so often now. He has this eager anticipation when he does it, as if he knows I’m going to be hilarious — so much so that he almost starts laughing before I even say a word.

Then yesterday at breakfast, Jacob requested more German songs. I finally got a couple of hymn books (one of which, Gesangbuch mit Noten, really is a German songbook). I sang some songs in German for the boys, while they enjoyed their blueberry crepes. Sadly Stille Nacht and O du fröhliche did not prove as hilarious as Glockenklang, but they got impatient as I looked through the idnex between each song, saying “Dad, just sing more German! Don’t look at those pages!” So I guess it was a hit.

I’m not sure where this sudden fascination with German music came from, but it appears to be leaving me hungry.

While driving around, Oliver requested I sing Glockenklang in the car. I said yes, despite not remembering even one German word to that song except for, well, Glockenklang. So I just filled in with some random German words I do know. Fortunately, they didn’t seem to have memorized the rest of it either.

The other day, we went to the annual Christmas concert at the local high school. It was perfect for the boys – various styles of music, an interesting old auditorium, nobody was going to care if they weren’t perfectly quiet, and the price was right, too.

The band played first, and both boys sat there, paying great attention, soaking it all in. They loved the cymbal crashes and Jacob seemed to dream of playing the chimes and bells. At one point, I whispered to Jacob that I could feel the timpani on the wood floor in the auditorium, and he tried it, and made his “Hmm, I just learned something interesting!” reaction.

As is tradition, the concert concluded with singing the Hallelujah Chorus – and anyone in the audience that wants to sing is invited on stage to join the choir.

I remember being in high school for that concert, and after practicing it in school, the great fun of being joined by many powerful voices from the community all around me on the risers. So this time, while my parents stayed with the boys, I was one of the many that went up to join the choir. It was no less thrilling all these years later. Ending with “Forever and ever, Hallelujah, Hallelujah. Hallelujah!”, and feeling it, right then, put a huge smile on my face.

If Programming Languages Were Christmas Carols

Last spring, I posted If Version Contol Systems Were Airlines, which I really enjoyed. Now, because I seem to have a desire to take a good joke way too far, it’s time for:

IF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES WERE CHRISTMAS CAROLS

I apologize in advance. (Feel free to add your own verses/carols in the comments.)

Away in a Pointer (C)

(to Away in a Manger)

Away in a pointer, the bits in a row.
A little dereference to see where they go.
I look down upon thee, and what do I see?
A segfault and core dump, right there just for me.

I saw thy init there, a reaping away
My process, from its address space, so sorry to say.
I thought I had saved thee, from void pointers all,
But maybe I missed one, and doomed you to fall.

Be near me, debugger, I ask thee to stay
Close by my terminal, and help me, I pray;
To find all the bugs and the void pointers too,
And if my kernel oopses, help me reboot for you.

Joy to the Wall (Perl)

(to Joy to the World)

Joy to the Wall, the Perl is come!
Let awk receive her King;
Let every grep prepare him room,
And bash and sed shall sing,
And bash and sed shall sing,
And bash, and bash, and sed shall sing.

Joy to the keyboard, we’ll use it all!
Let men, shift keys, employ;
Implicit variables, and globals never fall.
Repeat the line noise now,
Repeat the line noise now,
Repeat, repeat, the line noise now.

Perl rules the world with truth and ASCII,
And makes the doctors prove
The glories of carpal tunnel hands,
And we do it more than one way,
And we do it more than one way,
And we do it, and we do it, more than one way.

Hark! The Herald Coders Sing (Haskell)

(to Hark! The Herald Angels Sing)

Hark! The herald coders sing,
“Map and fold, recursive King;
Recursion and patterns wild,
Pure and IO — they’re reconciled!”
Joyful, all ye functions rise,
Join the typeclasses of the types,
With recursion, do proclaim,
“Laziness is born in this domain.”

Refrain
Hark! The herald coders sing,
“Map and fold, recursive king!”

Monads, by highest Heav’n adored;
Monads, their depths still unexplored;
Late in time, behold they’re good,
Never once were understood.
Veiled in functions, the Monads stay,
Used for IO, and more, each day,
With excitement, Monads say,
“Arrows are stranger, so with us stay.”

(Refrain)

Hail the glorious compiler of Glasgow!
Hail the threaded run-time system!
Join the beautiful Cabal of Hackage,
Upload there thy perfect package.
We know best, what we will Handle,
You’re safe with us: no pointers, no vandals.
Born to make your exceptions throw,
Unless you unsafePerformIO.

(Refrain)

Lispy the Paren

(to Frosty the Snowman)

Lispy the paren was a jolly happy soul,
With a lot of cars and a little cons
And two ends made out of curves.
Lispy the paren is a fairy tale, they say,
He was just common, but the children know
how he came to life one day.
There must have been some magic in that
Old Symbolics they found.
For when they placed him on its disk,
It recursed around and ’round.

O, Lispy the paren,
Was recursive as can be.
And the coders say it would take a day
To put his parens away.
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Look at Lispy go.
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Consing on the car.

Lispy the snowman knew
The keyboard was hot the day,
So he said, “Let’s cons and we’ll have some fun
now before they Scheme away.”
Down to the function,
With a list there in his RAM,
Running here and there,
all around the LAN, saying
“cdr me if you can.”
He led them down the streets of disk
Right to the traffic bus.
And only paused a moment when
He heard them holler (quit).

Oh BASIC Night

(to O Holy Night)

Oh BASIC night, the LEDs are brightly glinting;
It is the night of the dear GOSUB’s birth!
Long lay the world in sin and error printing,
Till you appeared and the RAM felt its worth.
Shiver of fear, line numbers do inspire,
For yonder breaks a mostly harmless GOTO.
Fall on your bits, O hear the Visual voices!
O BASIC divine, O BASIC where GOTO was born!
O BASIC, O Holy BASIC, O BASIC, you’re mine!

Some want to say, “GOTO is harmful always,”
But what of them, in their post-modern world.
We PRINT the truth, in the line-numbered goodness,
But Dijkstra appeared, and the faith, it was lost.
A thrill of hope, when .NET BASIC announces,
But Visual BASIC, what kind of thing are you?
Fall on your GUI, O see the old line numbers!
Behold BASICA, O BASIC when DOS was born!
O numbers, O lines, spaghetti divine!

Guido We Have Heard on High (Python)

(to Angels We Have Heard on High)

Guido we have hard on high
Sweetly indenting o’re the code,
And the functions in reply
Their exceptions sweetly flowed.

Refrain

Indent….. in your whitespace careful!
Indent…… in your whitespace careful!

Spaces, why this jubilee?
Why semicolons have you so wronged?
What backslashes must we use
If we want our lines so long?

(Refrain)

Come to Guido here to see
“One Right Way” is good, of course.
There’s no need for Perl, you know,
We have to be more verbose.

(Refrain)

Now the PEP will show the way
To the future, we shall see.
Banish lambda and the rest
Of the things we liked the best.

(Refrain)

Memories of Christmas, part 1

Merry Christmas to everyone today!

Today, and for the next few days, I’m going to write about some of my Christmas memories from earlier years. Then I’ll finish up with some photos from this year.

This post is about Christmas at home growing up.

One of the first signs of Christmas happened when my dad put up the lights on the outside of our house.

My brothers and I had (and still do) stockings that got one piece of candy per day during December, then got stuffed full when we opened our presents. The tree went up over the Thanksgiving weekend, and it was always a lot of fun to help with that.

On Christmas Eve, we’d always go to the program at church. It was the kids’ Christmas play. Church would be packed. On the way out, everyone got a gift sack with fruit (apples or oranges), some peanuts, and maybe some candy. Then we’d go home. Mom or dad would read the Christmas story from the Bible, and after a prayer, it was time to open presents. In addition to the regular presents, dad would always give us a large paper gift sack. It would usually have a 12-pack of pop and some sort of nut (peanuts, pastachios, or maybe peanut brittle).

Sometimes we’d all stand still long enough for a photo.

We’d usually stay up late into the night Christmas Eve and sleep in on Christmas day.