Air Force ‘mob’ is my Christmas Moment

If you’ve read my musings for any length of time, you know that each year I anticipate the Christmas Moment as the holiday approaches.

The Moment is when I know I’m in the spirit of Christmas - of family, of belonging, of renewal.

Some years, such as last year, I was concerned that it might not arrive at all. But, as always and as reliably as the North Star, it did.

But this year, as of right now, it’s a done deal, thanks to Facebook, Claire Fournier and the United States Air Force Band.

I do my fair share of Facebook trolling. Claire Fournier is the mother of my son-in-law John, married to my daughter Elizabeth. She is one of my FB friends.

Claire, in a Christmas mood herself after completing decorating the house, found and posted a National Public Radio blog about a flash mob the Air Force band pulled off at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Though it may not technically be a flash mob, band members on Dec. 8 came together in pieces to perform “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” from “The Messiah” by Bach. The band and the singers transitioned into “Joy to the World.”

See it here:

I don’t know that there’s anything more emotive to me at time than music. The right song at the right time will undo me. This is one.

I trust it’ll bring a tear or two or three of Christmas joy to your heart and soul. It did to mine.

Looking again for The Christmas Moment

I close myself off to Christmas at Halloween. I refuse to accept the season at a time of ghosts and goblins. I hate that retailers are forcing the season on the public ever earlier. Pretty soon, the first Christmas sales will start to accompany Back to School sales.

I don't start to open myself up to the notion of Christmas until the first of December. And then it's normally a gradual process of getting into the spirit.

Part of the process is what I've come to call my Christmas Moment.

It's when I know I'm in the zone and zen of Christmas. It has nothing to do with shopping, it has nothing to do with the frenzy, it has everything to do with the feeling about Christmas.

Normally it's associated with music, and usually it occurs late in the season, like at church on Christmas Eve.

Trouble is ... I might have already had my moment in the most unlikely of places, the gym.

I was in the middle of adjusting a Nautilaus weight machine when I heard Paul Potts come through the headphones of my iPod singing, "O, Holy Night."

Now, I have relatively few Christmas songs among the 1,500 or so I have stored on my iPod. And a Christmas song very rarely comes on when I have the iPod set to randomly play music when I work work out at the gym.

So the fact that I heard a Christmas song on my iPod was unusual. The fact that it would be "O, Holy Night" -- one of my Christmas favorites -- was also unusual.

And I did get that wash of reflective satisfaction come over me as I listened to Potts sing. Potts, you see, isn't very well known as a singer. He was a winner of the United Kingdom version of "American Idol" a couple of years back. He was a nobody selling cell phones, won the competition and started recording albums of classical music -- a great story of the everyman who finds a way to rise above his ordinariness.

At any rate, I figure the Moment has to count. How could it not? It met all the qualifications I impose upon it every year.

But I've judged that it was too easy.

So I'm on the search for Moment II. I'm looking for a Moment double dip.

And I think it'll be pretty easy to find because my very large, very boisterous family is supposed to coalesce at my mother's.

And that's a Moment, let me tell you, several in fact.

In search of The Moment

I am on my annual Scavenger Hunt, and it has one item on the list -- the Christmas Spirit.

Every year I am in search, actively and passively, of The Moment that I feel the spirit of the holiday. Perhaps I'm wrong to go looking for it, or even expect that it will come to me. But I do.

Often, when The Moment arrives it involves music.

Several years ago, it was during mass on Christmas Eve, while one of the carols was being sung. The woman behind me sang in beautiful harmony to the choir members on the risers at the front of the church. Last year it again involved hearing a rehearsal of Handel's "Messiah," but with my son in a church in London where he spent a semester.

I think of the spirit of Christmas and I think of the expectation and excitement of small children.

These days, however, the spiritual, magical part of Christmas is easily pushed aside by the commerce, chaos part of Christmas. The seasonal drumbeat of advertising and marketing seems to start earlier and earlier. The worse the country's economy, the earlier the drumbeat starts ... before Halloween this year. It's become like the presidential campaign: it starts too early, it lasts too long, it focuses too heavily on all the wrong things.

I made my obligatory trip to the mall, thinking I'd get in during the work week when no one else would be there. Silly me ... the place was packed with kids and parents trying to escape their homes that had no power or heat because of the severe ice storm that hit the area last week. I thought my head was going to explode. That certainly wasn't The Moment. It was more like The Wrong Moment.

I'm still on the hunt.

Have you had a Moment yet? Do you expect one, need one? Let me know by replying in the comments.