Pianos and Christmas trees

ShiroKuro Oh, what a lovely picture - the colour scheme of the tree compliments the chair and rug perfectly and the reflections of the lights on the piano and the windows are stunning. Pure class.

@danno858 That's another beautiful picture, it's clear that Christmas trees and pianos go well together.

I refuse to give in to the commercialism and have the decorations out before December starts. I'm always so tired of all the Christmass hype by the end of it that one month is enough.

BartK Same here, Bart, no decorations in our home until December, but I do appreciate the lovely photos on this thread.

Nightowl Same here, Bart, no decorations in our home until December, but I do appreciate the lovely photos on this thread.

Sorry if I sounded like the Grinch in my last post. I appreciate the pictures too and I'll post some of my own in December.

You don’t take them down by New Years Eve, do ya??

There’s commercialism, and then there’s personal enrichment, and one really has nothing to do with the other unless you choose it. I haven’t put up decorations in decades, but I’m in a new place, physically and enthusiastically, and I’ll be decorating next week. It’ll be well into January before I’ll be wanting a change of scenery. Roll the holiday cheer!

We don't bother to put up Christmas decorations in our living area because it's just us here, but it's kind of required to have them in the theatre lobby because we usually do a free admission movie for Santa Claus (with Santa coming to visit and so forth) so it would be kind of odd if there were no Christmas decorations.

I actually have four really unique and quite pretty two-foot snowflakes that look like they date back to sometime in the fifties that I hang over the candy counter (far enough back that the kids can't reach them). I found them in the basement here when I was cleaning out junk shortly after I bought the building thirty years back.

Gosh, thirty years now. I must be getting old....

Looking at those pictures makes me wanna play Charlie Brown Christmas music.

I usually wait until after Thanksgiving to set up a tree. My picture was from a Christmas Past like ShiroKuro!

danno858, yeah, it kinda depends on the transcription. The original Charlie Brown music was a trio, piano / bass / drums. And often, transcriptions are trying to at least fill in an approximation of the piano and bass, sometimes more effectively than others, for piano solo.

Something else I find is that Vince did a lot of improv that I have a hard time getting my head wrapped around completely (and sometimes don't even like) but am more and more OK with that of late because I wanna be a good player in my own standing and not just a Vince mini-me, or an Oscar Peterson mini-me, or an Art Tatum mini-me. It's good to figure out, know, and maybe even be able to do something exactly as someone else did, there is value in that. But repeating it over and over exactly the same way? If I wanted to do that, I'd be playing classical music, and that, I do not do anymore. It doesn't take long, when playing a classical piece and playing it the way I feel it, before someone "good and proper" will tell me how "wrong" I'm doing it... (probably a bunny trail, and some won't agree with me)...

Are these real trees or artificial ones? I always cut a young tree from the back yard for Christmas (they grow like weeds so I usually only keep about 6 years worth of seedlings and saplings at various growth stages around), so it's a real one and it has not been engineered to not drop needles, or sap for that matter. Obviously I am loathed to put such a tree close to my piano. How do you protect from unwanted moisture and other problems?