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Weather: Mostly cloudy with a 20 percent chance of showers. Highs in the mid 70s. East winds 5 to 10 mph. Sunday Night: Mostly cloudy. A slight chance of showers after midnight. Lows in the lower 60s. East winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 20 percent. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
Christmas Services: A Message of Joy, at 10 am. Meet Me At the Manger: Live Nativity from 2:45 to 3:30 p.m. Christmas Eve Worship at 3:30 p.m. A Message of Joy to the World, at Palm Coast United Methodist Church, 5200 Belle Terre Parkway, Palm Coast.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center: Nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. at Palm Coast’s Central Park, with 55 lighted displays you can enjoy with a leisurely stroll around the pond in the park. Admission to Fantasy Lights is free, but donations to support Rotary’s service work are gladly accepted. Holiday music will pipe through the speaker system throughout the park, Santa’s Village, which has several elf houses for the kids to explore, will be open, with Santa’s Merry Train Ride nightly (weather permitting), and Santa will be there every Sunday night until Christmas, plus snow on weekends! On certain nights, live musical performances will be held on the stage.
Bach Festival: If you stay up until midnight tonight, the annual Bach Festival on WKCR begins right then, and runs uninterrupted, commercial free, 24 hours a day, until Dec. 31 at 11:59 p.m. It is accessible online here. No app, no hassles. Just click on “Listen.” WKCR is the radio station of Columbia University. It has been producing the Bach festival since 1980, with students and guests hosting. And if 170 hours aren’t enough, the 89th Annual Bach Festival at Rollins College (it’s been going strong since 1935) begins February 2 and runs through March 3, under the artistic direction of John V. Sinclair. Concerts will include performances by the 160-voice Bach Festival Choir and Orchestra, and guest soloists. It’s presented by the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park. See every concert here, with some of them free and open to the public, but you must reserve ahead of time. See: “Putting Bach Back in Christmas.”
Grace Community Food Pantry is off for the holiday today. (An earlier version of The Briefing incorrectly reported it was open.)
Al-Anon Family Groups: Help and hope for families and friends of alcoholics. Meetings are every Sunday at Silver Dollar II Club, Suite 707, 2729 E Moody Blvd., Bunnell, and on zoom. More local meetings available and online too. Call 904-315-0233 or see the list of Flagler, Volusia, Putnam and St. Johns County meetings here.
Notably: This is when we take what passes for a break around here, between Christmas and the new year: a few fewer daily stories, a lot more time for books (offline) and hanging out, a lot of freebasing Bach (snorted, injected, breathed in, chewed), the occasional cigar and, because we are in some ways spiritual, the necessary pilgrimage, or hajj, to Brown Dog where–or so Innocent III, who is hopefully still burning in hell, wishes he had told the would be mass killers, in his and god’s name, of Cathars and Slavs and Jews and Byzantines and Muslims instead of the bullshit he did tell them–a good trappist beer or two is as good as an indulgence, wiping away all your year’s sins and then some. Meanwhile we’ll start of the seven days of Bach, or eight or nine or ten–however it may be that bridges the time from now to what is relatively sure to be a difficult year ahead for what’s left of our once-upon-a-time-in-the-West democracy. Meanwhile, Merry Christmas.
—P.T.
Now this: The joy, the sheer joy of the performers is worth the watch: Shout, exult, arise, and remember the beer.
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Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
By now we have seen that one of Bach’s monumental achievements was to show that music and language together can do things which neither can do separately. But he also proves that music sometimes surpasses language, whether written or spoken, in its capacity to penetrate to the innermost recesses of consciousness and to chip away at people’s prejudices and our sometimes toxic patterns of thinking. We can still turn to his cantatas and motets for enlightenment (with a small e) about sin, redemption, evil or repentance, with no more difficulty than we can to, say, a widely read nineteenth-century writer like Dostoevsky – someone who ‘found in the Christian religion the only solution to the riddle of existence’ and who ‘uncovered a volcanic crater in every human being’.36 Bach in fact makes it a great deal easier for us to focus on the injunction to love one’s neighbour than on all the filth and horror of the world. We emerge from performing or listening to a Bach motet chastened, maybe, but more often elated, such is the cleansing power of the music. There is not a whiff here of those ‘foul fumes of religious fervour’ that Richard Eyre sees today ‘spreading sanctimoniousness and intolerance throughout the globe, while those far-from-exclusively Christian virtues – love, mercy, pity, peace – are choked.’
–From John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (2013).
