Christmas Stuff
Lyric and Melody by Patrick O'Sullivan
UK Autoharps Christmas Advent Calendar, 2025, Day 4
Now on YouTube.
My contribution to the UK Autoharps Christmas Advent Calendar has become something of a family and friends tradition.
And an annual challenge. Every year, I must come up with a new Christmas song...
1.
There are problems. Thus, the work always gets done in November, when, in the northern hemisphere, we are all ill.
But there is, by now, a tool bag of solutions, developed through long meditation on the nature of Christmas and its Songs.
In the past this has been - I ackowledge - grim meditation. (In November...)
To give a flavour... Two other of my Christmas songs are...
Christmas Guest
here sung by Shannon Marie Harney
on YouTube
Christmas Guest on Amazon
Christmas Guest on Spotify
And on Apple, etc...
And...
Gifts From The Tree,
Sung by Patrick O'Sullivan
on YouTube
Video link
Https://youtu.be/yxZj-OA9xBI
Https://youtu.be/yxZj-OA9xBI
2.
This year, 2025, my new Christmas Song is called...
Christmas Stuff.
So, yes, a further meditation on the nature of Christmas. And its gifts... Not grim.
Even the most unwanted Christmas gift is a demonstration of love. Or, at least, of regard.
From that starting point - is there such a thing as an unwanted gift? - a song lyric that offers a list of possible Christmas gifts.
The lyric then becomes a list of lists. Christmas is a time for lists?
And the lyric follows the rhymes into comedy.
And, indeed, into theology.
3.
In the background - please forgive me - there is no doubt a residue of all the theology I have had to read in my academic life, which can lead to other ways of thinking about our Stuff. A starting point there might be what is called 'Prosperity Theology' - the belief that belief will deliver prosperity and material goods, and possession of such goods is in itself a sign of merit. So, Christmas Stuff.
The recent academic work has tended to concentrate on the new African Christianities, but the research trail is far deeper. Kate Bowler, Blessed : A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (2013), has become foundational. Then see, Marvin Harris, on Prosperity Theology and the 'American Dream', Tony Lin, on Prosperity Theology and 'Manifest Destiny'. 'Manifest Destiny' was first suggested by John L. O'Sullivan in 1845.
We can read on... From recent reading, see Charles Devellennes, The Macron Régime: The Ideology of the New Right in France (2023). Devellennes Chapter 3 is called simply 'Merit', and moves swiftly through Luther, Calvin and Weber to the ‘luck egalitarianism’ that is such a feature of ideologies in our own time.
'Prosperity Theology' tends to be regarded as heresy by the more established religions, but its logical twin - which we can call 'Disaster Theology' - has its own long and a comparativly respectable history. It might be summarised as: Yes, you suffer - and you deserve to suffer. The key text from my academic work is Peter Gray, Famine, Land, and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843-1850, Irish Academic Press (1999) - Peter Gray studied the history of the Irish Famine from within the archives of the British state, and found himself reading not economic theory but theology.
4.
The tradition is that my contribution to the UK Autoharps Christmas Advent Calendar should be illustrated with a little video on YouTube, using what documentary film makers now call 'the Ken Burns effect'.
By this stage, in November, I need to not to get bogged down in technicalities, technologies, and just have a little bit of fun, adding commentary to the lyric with illustrations. And, in the documentary film tradition, edit to the beat. Though, in the past, the President of UK Autoharps, Derik Palmer, has complained that my video editing did make him feel nauseous. Derik, I WAS editing to the beat. But this year I have calmed things down.
So, to the close connection between Autoharp traditions, the Appalachian Mountains, and the Sears, Roebuck Catalogue.
Earlier this year UK Autoharps hosted an online performance by John & Kathie Hollandsworth. I have met John in person, when he has visited England and Scotland - and have sat in on his lessons. Lovely man, lovely musician.
John Hollandsworth comes from that one part of the world where the autoharp escaped from the parlour, and became a folk instrument...
And this happened because, John reminds us, the Autoharp could be bought cheaply from Sears, Roebuck and Co.
A number of issues of the Sears Roebuck Catalogue are availble online. I have gone with the Sears, Roebuck and Co. Consumers Guide: Catalogue No. 104 : Spring 1897, from the Internet Archive....
Yes, it is called Consumers Guide.
A little bit of software twiddling to take images of the pages into video...
1897 is a significant date. In 1890 the U.S. Census Bureau declared that the American frontier had disappeared - there was no longer a frontier line to measure. (See above, 'Manifest Destiny'.) In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner published 'The Significance of the Frontier in American History', which has become a foundation document in American historiography. Sears Roebuck give us, yes, a Catalogue of what the archaeologists call the 'material culture' of the period. Two vast areas of the Catalogue I have not explored here, guns and horse tackle. But it is weird to see pictured in the Catalogue all the pieces of kit so familar to us from the Western movies that have so influenced world culture.
I have prowled around the musical instrument section of the Catalogue, to see the Autoharp amongst its companions and competitors. The cheapest 8 chord Autoharp was $2.75. I have flagged up one competitor, the Apollo Harp which takes the same flat zither box idea and attaches a piano keyboard structure on top. I have had difficulty finding other pictures of the Apollo Harp, and have never seen one in real life.
And now... Back to the Video
Patrick O'Sullivan
November 2025
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