We’re sending this letter to family members and as many friends as we can find this season. If you’re a Facebook friend or someone who reads this blog occasionally, we wish you the same happiness we wish others. We are persuaded that one can never have too many friends.

I posted Morten Lauridsen’s “O Magnum Mysterium” at Christmas a couple of years ago, but that performance has disappeared from You Tube. Here’s a link to another performance I like a lot, this one by the Los Angeles Master Chorale.

And while I’m posting music, here’s Chanticleer performing what has become a signature piece for them, the “Ave Maria” of Franz Biebl. My favorite Chanticleer album is still their 1992 Christmas album, Our Heart’s Joy, which was remastered and re-released in 2004 (I have the earlier CD). Here’s a performance of the carol that gave that album it’s title, though this is a performance by a later instantiation of Chanticleer, from their 2003 Portrait CD.

We used to call verse that mixed vernacular and Latin text Macaronics. It’s interesting, to me at least, that translations and paraphrases of this carol, perhaps the Macaronic original, like the fairly well-known though not very good 1837 paraphrase by Robert Pearsall, retain the Latin untranslated (except “Good Christian Men, Rejoice”). Of course one loses the effect of the Macaronic if the whole is translated; though I expect the real reason for the practice is that any educated person, before our own benighted time, could rede the Latin text, perhaps even understand that in German Latin, dulci is “dultsi.”

—Happy Christmas to all. In dulci jubilo!