Happy Christmas Eve! A quick scheduling note: this is our last regular WBUR Today newsletter of 2025. We have a special end-of-year newsletter coming up next Monday, and then will resume our normal daily newsletters on Jan. 2. Thanks for reading and supporting us this year — and happy holidays! Now to the news: Stay brassy, Boston: A long-forgotten holiday tradition is returning to Boston today. As WBUR's Amanda Beland reports, a group of trumpeters will play holiday carols live from the balcony of the Old State House on the corner of Congress and State streets, reviving what used to be an annual practice for the first time since World War II. - The backstory: The tradition started in 1913, a year after the city hosted the country’s first public Christmas tree lighting. (Some people in New York City think they hosted the country's first tree lighting, and they are wrong. Boston beat them by about 30 minutes .) For decades after, every Christmas Eve trumpeters took to the balcony to usher in the holiday season. It was also used to mark the end of the business year in Boston's Financial District. But the tradition stopped abruptly in 1942, when the buglers deployed to the war.
- Why is it back? Matt Wilding, a staffer for the downtown nonprofit Revolutionary Spaces, said they're reviving the tradition to try to build community. "Any opportunity that we have to get people to experience the city of Boston in a real intangible way — in a way that you can't experience on your cell phone — I think is worth doing," Wilding said. They hope to make it an annual event again.
- Know before you go: The roughly half-hour event kicks off at precisely 11:58 a.m. with a "town-crier style" announcement. It will include songs that were on the set list early 20th century, like "Jingle Bells" and the "First Noel." And it's all free and open to the public, a nice lunchtime perk for anyone downtown today.
'Tis the [sniffles] season: The Boston Public Health Commission is warning about a spike in flu cases this season. The commission said yesterday that there's been a 114% increase in reported cases, compared to this time last year. While there's often an uptick around the holidays, the city says it's happening a month earlier than usual — and after early hints that this flu season could be particularly nasty worldwide. - The message to the public: "Our concern right now is that many people have not been vaccinated and unfortunately there's a mismatch between the vaccine that we have available and the actual variant that we're seeing most commonly circulated," Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, the city's public health commissioner, told WBUR. That means the vaccine may not protect you as well against the current strain of flu — though Ojikutu still urges the public to get vaccinated. "We expect that this is going to be an ongoing issue and we want people to be aware," she said. "Flu vaccination does decrease the risk of serious illness from the flu."
Closing time: Acton-based Circle Furniture has suddenly shut down. According to The Boston Globe, the 70-year-old company told its 65 employees in an email last Friday that it was closing all nine of its stores across Massachusetts and New Hampshire until further notice. And then in an additional email yesterday, company leaders told employees that they're being laid off, effective immediately. - The email hinted at financial difficulties, but the abrupt news surprised even some of Circle's executives. “[The owners] were having some financial difficulties they were trying to resolve and work around, but that’s all I know,” Jonathan Boyle, the company's president, told the Globe. “It’s not a great situation.”
P.S.— We dropped a surprise, extra episode of our (cough, award-winning) podcast, Postmortem: The Stolen Bodies of Harvard. WBUR's Ally Jarmanning talks to fellow podcast host and reporter Amory Sivertson about the prison sentences for those involved, describes what it was like to meet Cedric and Denise Lodge for the first time outside a courthouse in Pennsylvania and explains what's next in the lawsuits against Harvard. Listen to the episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.