Thursday, December 3, 2009

Accuradio



We've started playing Christmas music in our house. The best way I've found to do this is accuradio. You'll find more subchannels defining the EXACT kind of Christmas music you want to listen to than you probably care about. For example, one day we tried the "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" channel and heard every version ever made of that song.

From all over the world.

It's not as monotonous as you might think because it sounds much different in Finnish than it does in Hindi, and it actually gives you a nice mix of all the genres of music style, albeit with the same lyrics. It gets quite hilarious after awhile.

Our favorite subchannel is the one pictured above, or the Country Christmas channel. They've added a few this year, "Quiet Christmas Eve" which I've not tried yet.

After hearing the lyric "Have a Holly Jolly Christmas...as you're walking down the street...say hello to friends you know and everyone you meet" Kiki commented "That would never work in Canada."

She's right. People here don't say Hi. Not even if you've all signed up to put your kids in Circus class and you're dropping them off and picking them up. Never, ever, under any circumstances make eye contact, don't dare mutter "hello". You'll get a blank stare.



No smile.
No acknowledgement whatsoever. Saying hello is just not done here.

This is one of the main reasons I miss the States.

2 comments:

Betsy said...

Thanks, Missy! I'll have fun with Accuradio. I've never heard of that one. We've used others, but this Christmas selection is great!

I'm listening to Elvis sing Blue Christmas....wait, it's over. Now on to Bing Crosby and David Bowie singing Little Drummer Boy. Too much fun!

Merry Christmas season to you!

Harrison said...

Yeah, the smiling and saying hello stuff doesn't work in Belarus either. People would look at me like I either wanted something from them, or else I was drunk -- and the only people that responded were drunk ones.

When Vika was first getting acclimated to the states, she would ask me how I knew the people I would smile and wave to. It took her a while to get used to the idea that you could smile and wave to a stranger just because you passed them and made eye contact.