Enchanted Christmas Chapel Memories

I love listening to Christmas music year round.

AI image created by Wes Fryer with Ideogram

This is my favorite instrumental Christmas music playlist on Spotify:

“Back in the day” this was a Pandora playlist called, “Peaceful Holidays.” Those were the years (starting in 2015) when I was the Director of Technology at Casady School in OKC. Lorin Swenson and I were still officing together in the annex adjacent to our school chapel. Carmen Clay was our neighbor. I had a wonderful set of desktop computer speakers, so Lorin would periodically be subjected to my Christmas music (“Peaceful Holidays”) as well. Some of my favorite afternoons were when Richard Job would come practice playing the chapel pipe organ down the hall, and we would hear a private concert of uplifting church hymns wafting into our open office doors. I look back on those years with great fondness.

*AI image created by Wes Fryer with Ideogram*

However, because I started activating music playlists like this on our home “smart speakers” with voice commands, I soon found that a playlist title like “Peaceful Holidays” was too generic to work.

Therefore, I started to precede most of my Spotify playlists with the first word of our Oklahoma City neighborhood, “Quail Creek.”

There are (apparently at this point in human history) NOT very many songs or playlists that start with the word “Quail.” So this is a reflection of the fact that today, in our “IoT / smart speaker / smart assistant home,” we live in a “Harry Potter-esque world” where we can literally utter spells or incantations, and get “magical things” to happen around us.

As long as we say the right words, in the right order, lights in our house turn on and off, televisions with smart albums of things (like all our golden retrievers through the years) display, strip lights and lightbulbs activate or deactivate automatically at dusk or dawn, and playlists of beloved instrumental Christmas music play.