When you are not very good at crafts, it’s nice to actually find a small niche in which you are not horrible. What I liked about candle making, which I did a few times when I was eight to ten years old, is that it was so relatively easy, even I couldn’t screw it up. Thank you, paraffin.
When I briefly attended a Unitarian church in a city near Albany, I left in part because they actually had a meeting/debate about whether or not to use candles. The argument against was that they were “papist”, too much in the Roman Catholic tradition, though I was a long-standing Protestant had lit plenty of church candles over the years.
One of the traditions of a lot of churches, including the last two, is to light candles and sing Silent Night by candlelight, before blowing them out, and singing Joy to the World as the lights come on. My previous church used to save all the used candles, and melt them down, to add to what became one massive candle. Last I saw it, it was well over a meter tall and weighed dozens of kilograms.
The Daughter loves lighting a candle when we have dinner, for no occasion at all.
Elton John performed a song called Candle in the Wind [LISTEN] in 1973, in honor of the late Marilyn Monroe, who had died a decade earlier. The tune appeared on the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album. The song was reworked in 1997 to honor Diana, Princess of Wales.; that single reached No. 1 in many countries, listed as the second best-selling single of all time, after White Christmas. LISTEN to the performance at the funeral, a recording of which I own.
Finally, from the musical-turned-movie Rent, Light my candle [LISTEN]
