Rediscovering Pentatonix

Are you familiar with the group?

They call themselves Pentatonix and they are all gifted singers.  When Christmas season nears, I always listen to their music on YouTube.  Their beautiful voices are out of this world.  The blending, the vocals…wow!

If you want to listen to them, you can always visit YouTube. There might be copyright infringement so I don’t want to post their songs here.

Have a beautiful Tuesday  my dear friends. I am finishing a lovely book at the moment. Will get back to you later.

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Four More Days

The Christmas clock says it is only 4 days and 15 hours to go before Christmas as I write this.

Looking forward to Christmas Eve too when we will again  attend the Christmas Eve mass before we prepare something for Noche Buena.  I am planning to cook some more  recipes in advance so I won’t be so busy when the time comes. Would just want to celebrate the time with the family. Just made two kilos of embutido a few days ago and they are now kept in the freezer. You only need to reheat/steam  them again before eating.

I was looking at my earlier  posts on Facebook’s Memories on this same day until last year. They have also made a video on how 2018 went based on earlier postings. I found this photo I took of our Christmas tree years before.

I used to make these memes via my Canon Ixus camera but now my camera is gone and I haven’t replaced it yet.

And this too:

When I think of the years I’ve written about life, the beauty of it and all its angst, I sometimes wonder where I am coming from. The beauty of life, we celebrate it. We smile at those memories that come and go leaving us breathless at times. We embrace the life the way we should, anticipating another lovely day to celebrate. Yes, life is a celebration.

This paragraph is an excerpt from one of my earlier posts here at WordPress but I could no longer remember its title.  Senior moments, really!

After gardening  yesterday and an early scheduled  washing today, it is time to relax and just enjoy the Christmas music I am listening to from YouTube. Yes, I just love the Pentatonix.  I love this best, the Little Drummer Boy.  Oh but I love them all. Enjoy the music.

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A Song From The Heart

When music inspires, the soul rejoices and the heart is happy.

Yesterday was one of those days that kept me a little morose. Being alone has its rewards, the interminable silence that keeps your mind wander  but there are times when you feel that you need to do something aside from talking to yourself and your three dogs.  My son called up yesterday and told me that he was really happy to stay in Boracay for a week.  “I know” I said, it is a much-needed break. They will be coming home tomorrow and I am excited to see him again.

Out of boredom (yes, I was really bored) I played Christmas carols on YouTube. Seeing the digitally remastered  Christmas album of Johnny Mathis made me smile. It made me remember my Dad when he was alive. He used to have this LP and it was a family favorite  and we would all look forward to listening to the album in our portable player every time Christmas season comes. It brought back lovely memories  of the past, nostalgic and magical.  I visited Hallmark channel too and checked all the uploaded full movies that you can just click and play. I found A Song From The Heart  which was worth the almost two hours  I was glued to the monitor. It starred Amy Grant, Keith Carradine and D. W. Moffett. Amy Grant is cast as Maryann Lowery, a blind music teacher. New Age pianist Gregory Pavan (D.W. Moffett) became romantically involved with the talented  Maryann and coaxed her to have an eye operation because he knew she had what it takes to be world-renowned concert cellist. Oliver Comstock  (Keith Carradine), is cast as a close neighbor who has always worshipped Maryann  from afar. I had a great time watching and listening to the music. And as if that wasn’t enough, I watched another movie (for the nth time,  I guess).  I read the book  The Promise when I was in college and watched the movie adaptation with my youngest brother during the mid-eighties. That  was back when Danielle Steel was such a very popular romantic novelist and some of her books were made into movies. I was curious if the movie which I loved thirty years back would still hold the same  fascination for me. It did. I  think the latter was the movie where I memorized the name of the characters, aside from another favorite movie Dying Young.  I accidentally found  the book version many years after watching the movie several times too. The movie adaptation was I think better than the book and I loved the music of Kenny G.

The power of music – it makes you smile, it makes you sing too but sometimes it makes you cry. “Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence” so says Robert Fripp. Do you agree? I do.

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Excited

We’re into the first week of the Advent season and  I’m just like a child waiting for Christmas. And did I say, I have my countdown?  It’s Josef’s day off so we had the chance to do some honest to goodness cleaning. I was pleasantly surprised when he showed me his room  with a  functioning 14-inch color television complete with a DVD player.  He brought them down when he cleaned up our upper cabinets.  I have completely forgotten about them, they’ve  been there since typhoon Ondoy and that was more than four years ago. We sorted out a box full of CDs, DVDs, some favorite movies that Nissa collected and songs of yesteryears  which are still so good to hear and listen to.

And it’s time to bring out those treasured Christmas albums and sing along with the likes of The Gunter Kallmann Choir, Jose Mari Chan and the upbeat Tagalog Christmas songs of the Dyna Ensemble.  A friend who was a former DJ asked me if I have an album of The Gunter Kallmann Choir. I just learned from him that it is no longer available locally.  It’s the best album there is that I have treasured listening to through the years.  It makes me  feel nostalgic just listening to the music and remembering Christmas past.  We have  Nate now and it would surely be a happy one for us.  It’ll be his second Christmas with us and  I am sure he  can now appreciate the twinkling lights on the Christmas tree and the sound of Christmas carols that he could dance to.

I was thrilled when I saw the number of likes, comments and shares  on this simple message which was culled from one of my previous Christmas blogs  here at WordPress.  Last Sunday, I  posted it at our Catholic site which I help maintain at Facebook. As of today, it earned 34 tags, 1,603 likes, 798 shares and 73 comments. Amazing. Maybe they found the message uplifting. I am sharing it again here:

It’s the Holy Season of Advent and we’re now celebrating the first Sunday. Every year, we look forward to the coming of Jesus and pray those beautiful prayers of longing and waiting and sing those beautiful songs of hope and promise.

The Advent season is full of God’s blessings for all of us. He makes us realize and remember to look back at the whole year that is about to end and to look forward to a new and hopeful year that is about to begin. Are we ready to take Him into our hearts? Are we ready to accept Him in our lives? True, we always say time is gold and we should not waste it but we also need to take stock of what is more important, a quiet contemplation, a moment of silence, a minute of giving thanks. Let this be a season of joy for all of us, awaiting a most precious event of the season – a baby born in swaddling cloths to save mankind.

Wow, it’s 23 days to go before Christmas!

 

 

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