Christmas in June

It’s hot outside. There are two weeks of spring left and here in Memphis it already feels like August. Record highs are being set left and right. It was so hot one day last week that it caused a one-hundred-year record to melt away. It. Is. Hot!

As minister of music it’s time for me to go through all the new Christmas musicals sent out by various music publishers and decide which one we’ll present to our church and community in December. So what am I doing in this hot June weather? Listening to Christmas music! I imagine this is how Mel Torme and Bob Wells felt on that very hot summer day in 1944 when, while trying to mentally cool themselves, they wrote “The Christmas Song” (also known as “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”). However, it is taking me longer than the forty minutes it took them to write that song.