Friday with the Tabernacle Choir

This year’s Jewish festival of Hanukkah begins tomorrow evening, Sunday evening, 14 December 2025, and continues through Monday, 22 December 2025.  I’m hoping to find our menorah and set it up between now and tomorrow night.  Seriously.  (I like Passover, too, and have led several seders.  They’re great teaching tools.)  How much do you know about the holiday?  It’s actually rather interesting:

• The Associated Press:  “What to know about Hanukkah and how it’s celebrated”
• The Jerusalem Post: “Hanukkah miracle: Israel discovers evidence of Judah Maccabee’s battlefield near Jerusalem: The site is widely identified with the ancient village of Bet Zecharia, where the Seleucid army and the forces of Judah Maccabee clashed in what is known as the fifth Maccabean battle.”
• And an interesting Jewish perspective in the Wall Street Journal: “Holidays Begin at Home: Our Passover and Hanukkah rituals have taught my family the joy of staying put.”

Here’s a bit of Christmas-related news from the Babylon Bee: “Planned Parenthood Honors King Herod With Lifetime Achievement Award”

I confess to not being a really enthusiastic fan of all of these movies — nor, really, even of most of them — but you might get some good ideas here:  “10 best Christmas movies to stream this holiday season: Looking for the perfect holiday movie night lineup? Explore iconic Christmas films available to stream now”

Following a dinner on the top floor of the Relief Society Building, my wife and I crossed the street to the Conference Center for the 2025 Christmas with the Tabernacle Choir concert.  Along with the Tabernacle Choir, the Orchestra at Temple Square and the Bells at Temple Square also performed.  The guest artists for the program — which ran Thursday, Friday, and Saturday and which will be partially reprised for the choir’s weekly Sunday morning broadcast — were Stephanie J. Block and her husband, Sebastian Arcelus, along with two Argentine Latter-day Saint artists, the bandoneónist Julián Mansilla and the violinist Leandro Curaba (who, although it wasn’t mentioned in his biography on the program, is currently serving as an area authority Seventy for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints).

The program was a varied one.  It concluded, of course, as it always does, with a reading from Luke 2 — can there really, seriously, be any legitimate doubt that Latter-day Saints are Christians?  I mean, really? — and then with Mack Wilberg’s spectacular arrangement, for choir and orchestra and soloists and Bells at Temple Square and Gabriel’s Trumpets, of the French carol “Angels from the Realms of Glory.”

Inspired by that, as today’s bit of Christmas music I give you a link to a previous performance of “Angels from the Realms of Glory” at the Tabernacle Choir’s Christmas concert.  This one, recorded in December 2005, features the illustrious American operatic soprano Renée Fleming and the Tabernacle Choir, under the baton of Craig Jessop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAGrD_gOdgI

Along the way, though, this year’s program also sampled music from Latin America and detoured into a bit of Spanish.  (Sebastian Arcelus is partly of Uruguayan descent, and speaks the language fluently.)  I quite liked a piece by Astor Piazzolla (and arranged by Julián Mansilla) entitled “Adios, Nonino” (“Farewell, Grandfather”).  It was written at the death of his grandfather, and isn’t a particularly Christmas-related piece.  But I liked it very much.  There were also traditional carols and spirituals, as well as Beethoven and Irving Berlin, and Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Mendelssohn, and Handel, and a very well received organ solo by Richard Elliott, who is always an audience favorite.  And a story about the astronauts of Apollo 8 reading Genesis 1:1-10 to the world from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1968.

Especially in connection with the latter, but also throughout, the visual display for the program was, in some ways, I think, the most ambitious that I’ve ever seen for one of these programs.  Enormous panoramas of the cosmos and of Earth from space and of alpine mountain scenes were projected not merely onto the area immediately surrounding the stage and adjacent to the organ pipes but onto the adjacent walls, covering perhaps a hundred or more degrees of the surrounding Conference Center.  Pretty spectacular.

The Tabernacle Choir and the Orchestra at Temple Square put on a remarkable program each year.  I’m glad that the programs are recorded and made available for subsequent years.

Now, though, being the notorious gourmand that I am, a self-confessed serial eater, a repeat offender, I’m obliged to write about FOOD:  On the way home from Salt Lake City this morning, we seized the opportunity to stop by Siegfried’s Delicatessen, where we took out some Bratwurst and Sauerkraut and Rotkohl — we should have also picked up some Wienerschnitzel and Kartoffelsalat but, for some reason, didn’t — and brought it home.  It’s another traditional part of my rather Germanic Christmas celebration.  And we dropped by Banbury Cross Donuts and picked up several boxes of their wares — among the best donuts I know, anyway — as gifts for some of our neighbors.  I went out this evening to distribute them with a Third-Generation Unit, who sang an unabashed solo of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” at each door until the last one, when the 3GU was suddenly overcome by unaccountable shyness.

Finally, the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™ typically yields an especially bounteous harvest at this season of the year, and 2025 is proving to be no exception:

Deseret News: “Washington Post columnist highlights Latter-day Saint responses to political hatred: Dana Milbank suggested the Church of Jesus Christ ‘may have an answer for our toxic politics’”

In case you’re able to access it, here’s a link to the original article in The Washington Post:  “Why Mormonism may have an answer for our toxic politics. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox draws on teachings from his Mormon faith to “disagree better.””

This is relevant: Interfaith America:  “Two Governors — a Mormon Republican and a Jewish Democrat — Team Up to Stop Political Violence”  And here is a thirty-minute video of the two governors’ conversation with Dana Bash, of CNN:  “Political violence traumatized their states. A Republican and a Democratic governor come together with a plea: Tone it down”