Marvin (my personal robot assistant)! Can you come in here for a few minutes and vacuum up all these fragments? No, not with your mouth! Use your upholstery attachment. Silly robot.
Lots to do around the holidays, as you well know. Some tasks are more challenging than others. I’ve always found bending candy canes particularly difficult. A lot of breakage. There’s got to be a better way! (Matt is thinking about taking a correspondence course in pretzel-bending, so maybe some of those skills will be transferable. We shall see.)
As I was saying last week, we have some holiday traditions that we try to observe on a yearly basis. Some of them could be described as strange; others, just a little off the beaten path. Occasionally we try out a new “tradition” and see if it sticks, like that year we put the man-sized tuber on an upside-down wash basin and decorated him like a Christmas tree. I think that was Anti-Lincoln’s idea. Anyway, it lacked that kind of stickiness I was referring to earlier. (Tubey still isn’t talking to Anti-Lincoln … not that tubey talks all that much ordinarily.)
Probably our best-known tradition is writing, recording, and releasing a parcel of Christmas songs – that is, Christmas-themed pop songs. That stretches way back to the late 1980s when brother Matt used to hand out cassette tapes to all and sundry on Christmas eve. Our first album, 2000 Years to Christmas, was a collection of some of our favorites from those ancient tapes – 13 songs drawn 
from what was easily a catalog of about 60 to 75 songs in total over eight years or so. (That was a large component of Matt’s musical output, though by far not the majority of songs he wrote over that period.)
Now we put them out on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. Some of the ones we’ve put out in recent years are additional selections from Matt’s cassette tape holiday basket, re-recorded in our basement studio. Others are more recent concoctions.
So, look under your tree this Christmas for another parcel of holiday cheer from Big Green. Got a laptop and wi-fi? Plunk it under the tree and point your browser to big-green.net/pod. It’s that simple. Santa works in mysterious ways.
No, it’s not my brain. It’s my list of songs. Sixty five songs and counting. Shoo-wee, right? That’s enough songs to fuel the enormous asbestos-clad boiler of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for a hundred years. (Well, that may be a slight exaggeration.) What was it I heard Lincoln (or anti-Lincoln) saying the other day? Oh, yeah. “A chicken’ll make you a meal… or it’ll lay enough eggs for a thousand breakfasts. A lamb – that’s about two weeks worth of mutton. Or you can have warm wool coats from now until doomsday…” That Lincoln- just brimming with frontier wisdom. (Actually, I think he borrowed that from Royal Dano in one of his more nefarious incarnations on The Big Valley, Lincoln’s favorite T.V. drama.)
Sure, there’s that. Then there are the songs that are complete and yet still in the can, never released commercially. Mostly these are recordings that have no proper album to call home. They are made in the usual Big Green way – lay out a polymer disc, slather it full of mastic, add music and apply pressure… much pressure. Then toss. Well… we tossed them a little too far, perhaps, and no one has had the energy to go and pick them up. Those will likely see the light of day at some point, though I don’t know exactly when. (Let me consult with my fellow nut cases and get back to you.)