Christmas dominates the year.

It’s a culmination, and a look ahead.

The season has been pushed back beyond December. People used to wait until after Thanksgiving to put up lights and decorations. Now, with economic aggrandizement calling the shots, decorations are starting to appear before turkey time and people start buying early.

Shirley and I did it right. We made it last.

We spent many happy hours planning how we would decorate our store. Window displays. Special books. Clothing, jewelry, perfumes, art crafts, gift ideas.

It would be an extensive space with a comfortable ceiling, not a hole-in-the-wall, touch and go. If you’re going to do something, do it right.

We would put out spiced cider and Stollen for the happy customers. There would be Christmas music playing throughout the store.

There’s too much to write about Christmas in one blog entry. I’m limiting myself to music and movies, and only a partial list, because they were part of every year. And we never had the store.

Certain things we did every year. We always played the recording of Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, with him conducting. He wrote the work on board the ship bringing him back to England from America in 1942. The war was still raging, but he wanted to come home.

The Ceremony of Carols is one of the few perfect works of music. We loved the record of the performance in 1943, Britten conducting the Copenhagen Boys’ Choir, Mogens Woldike, choirmaster, and Enid Simon, harp. We have other recordings, some with the careful perfection of the Choir of Westminster Abbey, or the Vienna Choir Boys, or…But Britten and the Danish Boys are so of-the-moment, a naïve freshness and innocence not constrained by perfection. And they have a charming way with the language. It was part of every Christmas season and gave vitality to the hope for the coming year.

We also played, every year, the 1952 recording of Dylan Thomas reading his A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Again, there are other recordings, all with merit. Richard Burton. Alec Guinness was very nearly as good as Thomas, but the Thomas reading is the authentic one, and never gets old.

When they made a movie, with Denholm Elliott, an actor I wish I knew better, we rejoiced. The visual concept is so judiciously presented that it supplements without supplanting or entirely suppressing the mental images Dylan Thomas conjured in the memory.

These are stories of joy, and every year we shared them.

And songs. Christmas carols that everybody knows and can sing along with. We didn’t regularly go caroling, but sang whenever voices were raised, in churches, at parties. We sang What Child Is This? The 1865 lyrics adapted to the 16th Century folk song, 1580, Greensleeves. We loved that song from the days of our Sterling Consort, performing in hand-made renaissance costumes all over Southern California. Good times, good memories.

Shirley’s Father, Jimmy, was a baritone with a loud voice studying opera, and earned extra holiday money singing in churches and synagogues.

I myself sang a few times here and there. I already told you about the time I discovered that unknown to me my Mother had arranged for me to be the guest soloist from California, in a small poor Black church in the suburbs of Buffalo, and, impromptu, I sang German Christmas.

I liked recordings of special note, like Jessye Norman singing Cantique de Noel, O Holy Night, in French, with her unbelievable voice. I played Jussi Bjoerling’s classic performance of the same song that many critics hail as the finest recording of the tenor voice.

And of course we watched holiday movies. TV was full of them. Every year they played Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Young Jimmy Stewart, idealistic and vulnerable, confronted Mr. Potter, a mirror image of an unredeemed Scrooge, and the Capra spirit of the ‘30s and ‘40s replayed the hope of those early days of democracy’s potential.

And all those Scrooge movies. A Christmas Carol in black and white. Alistair Sim. Then color, then as a musical. All those iconic Scrooges reinforced the realization that yes, we can. And then, of course, The Grinch.

And the archetypical Kris Kringle, Edmund Gwenn, in A Miracle on 34th Street. A take-home Santa.

And a reprinting of the Newspaper Letter, “Yes, (your name), there is a Santa Claus.”

And all those Hallmark movies, new ones every year, and a replay of the earlier ones, RomCom, some, we were delighted to realize, were filmed in and around Riverside where we were living at the time and will never forget.

And the Reindeer movies. Prancer, a must see. And Blizzard, where Whoopi Goldberg is the deer voice, and Christopher Plummer is a surprisingly a-typical Santa.

And Christmas concerts everywhere. Every church competing. Every auditorium booking the symphony and chorus. We couldn’t go to every one, but we got around. Midnight Mass kept people awake past their bedtime.

And every ballet company putting on The Nutcracker. Our dear friend David Wilcox, who studied Royal Ballet at the same studio with Shirley, went on to dance in Europe and came back to head the Long Beach Ballet which he took on tour and brought to the Pasadena Civic Auditorium for local acclaim.

Every year we’d watch the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Nutcracker on TV with Maurice Sendak’s realization and a very memorable Drosselmeyer.

I sometimes forget that my recommendation of a first opera to see for neophytes is La Boheme. That’s emphasized in the Oscar winning film Moonstruck. It’s a Christmas opera. The whole second act is nothing but.

There’s so much I could say about Christmas. I’ve already elsewhere described the parties.

Shirley and I loved the season as we loved each other. We joked, as our gift to each other, we could wrap ourselves, put a bow on, and snuggle as presents under the tree.