Do you know how Christmas trees are grown?

I upload this song almost every year. It is to celebrate the coming Christmas season, it is also, believe it or not, a song from a James Bond movie set during Christmastime. By the way, the original novel is a great Christmas read too. A warning to those who have not listened to it before: it has some of the silliest lyrics a Christmas song ever has. About rain freezing in winter and killing the tree if it does not have love. Things like that. That said, maybe it is because of the movie, or the circumstances where it is played in the movie, which you can read about in one of my previous posts. I may blog more about On Her Majesty's Secret Service in the upcoming weeks. In any case, to kick start the Christmas season, I thought this silly song was good enough.

Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?

Well, no, this is not a rhetorical question. And I know I have uploaded this song in the past (at least twice). I thought I needed to kick start the Countdown to Christmas (we are the first day of Advent) with a Christmas song. A very silly, yet irresistible song, in spite or because of its silliness. It was taken from On Her Majesty's Secret Service, an underrated Bond movie. In the movie, Bond is trying to escape Blofeld's henchmen, there is a huge Christmas celebration going on outside, in the Swiss Alps, the atmosphere is festive, and he is trying to save his life. The song is all about innocence and love, Santa Claus and reindeers and so on and so forth. I find this deliciously ironic. Maybe you need to watch the movie to really appreciate it, maybe by itself it is just something cheesy. Nevertheless, here it is.The picture on the left is a courtesy of my cousin.

John Barry is immortal

There are moments like this, you think you are going to blog about something (I had in mind "End of the month, beginning of the week" as a topic) and then the news feeds you something else. So John Barry died. I really admired him as a composer, but more than that, I adore his music. His James Bond score of course. The movies would not have been such classics without his music. I feel speechless in these circumstances, like I was going to give my sympathies to the family members of someone I knew, enjoyed the company of and admired. You just feel dumb. But when it comes to John Barry, or indeed any musician, there is always his music. He composed his own eulogy, better than anybody could have.

I wondered which one of his famous works to put here. I have done so before, things that would have been appropriate for the circumstances. But I thought the theme music for Midnight Cowboy would have the right tone. And if my readers allow me a cliché before I publish this, I will say that John Barry is immortal.

Savez-vous ce qu'il faut au sapin de Noël?

J'ai déjà placé cette chanson sur le blogue dans un billet récent. Mais j'ai décidé d'y consacrer un autre billet en français car il y a une version française de Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown, interprétée par Isabelle Aubret. C'est un peu quétaine (correction: c'est d'un quétaine absolu), mais c'est très mignon et ça met dans l'ambiance saisonnière. On retrouve la version allemande ici. Quand je l'écoute, j'ai toujours en tête la scène d'On Her Majesty's Secret Service où on l'entend pour la seule et unique fois. Elle est alors d'une redoutable efficacité pour établir l'ambiance et introduire la réapparition de Tracy Bond (interprétée par la grande Diana Rigg), ange sur patin venue sauver Bond. George Lazenby n'a jamais été un grand acteur, mais il joue admirablement bien ici. Alors je remets la chanson sur le blogue, histoire de passer le temps d'ici à Noël.

Do you know how Christmas trees are grown?

It might be a bit early, but my wife and I did the Christmas tree today. Tomorrow might have been more appropriate technically, as it is the beginning of Advent, but today is the weekend and we had time to spend on it, so it was more practical. Some people are so obsessive that they put it on early November, so we are not so bad anyway. Sadly, we bought by mistake the one with the slim line and not the large one (mea culpa, I am the one who picked it up), but it is our first Christmas tree so I won't complain too much. She blogged about it herself. Anyway, it is nice to have a Christmas tree, even an artificial one, it puts us in a festive mood. I can't wait to smell the real Christmas tree in my parent's house though. I put some pictures here of the tree. You can see at the top right the very first Christmas decoration I bought for here, when I started my job in 2007. For some reason, I am particularly fond of it.

Now, people may wonder where I got the title of this post. It is not from me, and I understand that it is ironic to have it as a title about an artificial Christmas tree. Still, it has a good ring to it, so I decided to put it here. It is actually the title of a song in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The song is a bit silly, but really enjoyable. In the movie, its silliness actually works to make the scene works beautifully. Because it is set mostly during Christmas time, On Her majesty's Secret Service is one of my favourite seasonal movies. I found the song on youtube (with rather poor and irrelevant images, sadly) and I put it here to kick start Christmas season:

Dr No and his three deadly mice

It's sunny, it's hot and I have no idea what to blog about. I want to 1)have a job (it's inhuman to jobhunt on such a nice day) and 2)go on holiday. I want to go to go and take a dip in a pool.
Anyway, ever watched Dr No? The intro is famous for the gunbarrel sequence and for the very first use of the James Bond theme, but there is more to see: the way the action starts from the credit sequence is brilliant, and so is the Kingston Calypso song, innocent enough the first time you hear it, but deliciously ominous you pay attetion to the lyrics. You can find the complete song here (I don't like much of the rest of the site, but to find James Bond music it's very good. You have the introduction of Dr No down here, with gunbarrel and the three blind mice in question:



What a way to start a movie, and to kick off a franchise!

Underneath the Mango Tree

Maybe it's because of the weather, it's feeling really summery today, but I have that old song from Dr. No in the head. I loved that aspect of Dr. No: the way the music was part of the plot. ironic as well that Honey Rider was singing this when Bond found her, it's a love song about marriage and the joys of a quiet, normal life, something James Bond was never really fond of. Anyway, here's the song I had in the head all day.