Archives for December 2016

“Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.”

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind

Louis Armstrong recites Clement Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas.” This was Armstrong’s last commercial recording. He made it at his home in Queens on February 26, 1971, five months before his death:

To learn more about the history of this recording, go here.

“Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.”

Aldous Huxley, Grey Eminence

Rachel Harnisch, Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic perform “Laudate Dominum,” a setting of Psalm 117 from Mozart’s Vesperae solennes de confessore, K. 339, performed in 1999 at Salzburg Cathedral during a memorial concert for Herbert von Karajan:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?”

J. M. Barrie, The Little White Bird

From 2006:

Why, then, did I never get around to putting up a tree of my own after I left home? The answer, I suppose, is that since I made a point of coming back to Smalltown, U.S.A., for the holidays each year, I never found it necessary. What began as a convenience hardened into habit, and by the time I was forty the notion of buying and decorating a Christmas tree seemed to me senseless. No doubt that said more about the confusion of my private life than it did about any domestic urges I was sweeping under the rug, but whatever my deeper reasons might have been, the fact remains that the tree I trimmed last week is the first one I’ve had in thirty-two years….

Read the whole thing here.

“Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

A scene from Miracle on 34th Street, written and directed by George Seaton, featuring Edmund Gwenn and Philip Tonge. The film was released in 1947:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)