An icy retreat, historic movies and a birdsong serenade

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An icy retreat, historic movies and a birdsong serenade

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December 18, 2021

What's your favorite Christmas song? I'm fairly traditional, so I like "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," and a Catalonian song called "El cant dels ocells" which sounds like the saddest song ever, but is really about birds celebrating the birth of Jesus. Last year, I was also introduced to Duke Ellington's version of Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker Suite," and boy oh boy, it's a good one. So tell me! It certainly doesn't have to be a Christmas song, either -- whatever you celebrate, whatever brings you good cheer this time of year, I know you have a soundtrack to go along with it.

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Our favorites this week

Get going with some of our most popular good news stories of the week

Found love
There's no denying it: Some families are just meant to be. Twenty-one years ago, Danny Stewart (above, left) found a newborn baby abandoned on a subway platform in New York City. He and his partner (now husband) Pete Mercurio made sure the baby got to a hospital safely, but they couldn't shake the feeling they'd be connected to the child forever. Sure enough, a few months later, a judge asked Stewart if he'd be interested in adopting the child. The couple agreed, and two years later, the little baby they had saved from a subway platform became their son. They named him Kevin, and as he grew up, Mercurio would tell him the story about how he came into their lives, wanting the boy to feel positive about his origin story -- and wanting him to know he was wanted. "We've always told Kevin from a very young age that he was left out of love, so that he could be found and cared for," Mercurio says. Now, Kevin is a 21-year-old college senior, and Mercurio has turned the story into a book, titled "Our Subway Baby," so other children can know that family, indeed, comes from all places.

The sweetest song
As I was writing today's intro, it didn't even occur to me how neatly it would fit with this story! What serendipity. Usually around this time of year, holiday hits from Mariah Carey, Michael Bublé and the like rule the music charts. But in Australia, a different kind of album has beaten them out to break the top five: an album of birdsong. "Songs of Disappearance," which features the calls of 53 of Australia's most threatened bird species, soared to fifth place in the Australian Recording Industry Association album chart. Several nature experts and conservation groups worked together to create the album, bringing together the precious calls of the swift parrot, orange-bellied parrot (above), princess parrots, forty-spotted pardalotes, regent honeyeaters and other endangered species. BirdLife Australia, which released the album, said the remarkable project -- and its success -- shows that Australians will "not allow... precious avian voices to be silenced."

Here comes the sun
For the first time in space exploration history, a manmade craft has "touched" the sun. The Parker Solar Probe successfully flew through the sun's corona, or upper atmosphere, to sample particles and our star's magnetic fields. In case you're wondering, it's as hot as you would imagine. The sun's corona is about 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit at its hottest point, while the surface -- which is surprisingly much cooler -- is only around 10,340 degrees. The probe's feat is a hugely exciting development because getting more insight into our own sun and its evolution will give us more clues to understand all of the other stars in the universe. Oh, and we touched the sun! We will ignore the ominous mythological implications of that and focus on the more poetic ones.

Raise a glass to...

All of the new films that have been added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Every year, 25 new films are added, and they are as eclectic as they are influential. This year's inductees include "Return of the Jedi" (1983), "Selena" (1997), "Strangers on a Train" (1951) and, yes, 2008's "WALL-E." The full list is here. It would make a pretty cool movie marathon, wouldn't it?

Heroes among us

Congratulations to CNN's 2021 Hero of the Year, Shirley Raines! Raines and her non-profit Beauty 2 the Streetz have been a mainstay on LA's Skid Row for the past six years, providing food, clothing, and hair and makeup services to thousands of people. As the 2021 CNN Hero of the Year, Raines will receive $100,000 to expand her work. She and the other top 10 CNN Heroes honored at last weekend's gala all receive a $10,000 cash award. During the ceremony, Raines thanked her children, including her late son Demetrius, whose loss inspired her work. Raines says her story is proof you don't need to be whole to be the missing piece in others' lives. "This surely hasn't been easy. I stand before you a very broken woman," an emotional Raines said. "I am a mother without a son and there are a lot of people in the streets without a mother -- and I feel like it's a fair exchange."

Wanna get away?

Photo credit: Magnus Mårding

Now this is a room fit for royalty! Very chilly royalty, but royalty nonetheless. It actually was designed by royalty too. Sweden's ICEHOTEL, the world's first hotel built out of snow and ice, has unveiled a brand new suite designed by Prince Carl Philip of Sweden and his business partner Oscar Kylberg. The pair wanted the room to have the feeling of a midsummer celebration rich with myth and lore, which is no small feat when you're working with ice. The walls of the suite are adorned with ice blocks filled with colorful flowers and fauna, and a stunning ice chandelier filled with flowers hangs from the ceiling. If you think it looks cool from afar, the photos of the details are even, well, cooler.

Hear, hear!

The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is – it's to imagine what is possible.

- bell hooks, in her book "Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations." The seminal author, academic and feminist passed away this week at the age of 69.

Who knew?

Whether you like it or not, you probably have the lyrics to entire Christmas songs knocking around in your heard. Why are these tunes so popular, no matter how many times we hear them? "The main thing with Christmas music and holiday music is it's the one time in music that the older you are, the cooler you are," says Gary Trust, senior director of charts at Billboard. After all, Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You" is a fairly modern classic, and it's almost 30 years old! They also tend to be embedded in iconic pop culture moments or works of art. Experts say you can thank "White Christmas" for that. Written by the legendary Jewish Tin Pan Alley composer Irving Berlin, it's widely credited as one song that got the world on board with secular, popular Christmas tunes. Oh, and the movie was based on the song -- not the other way around!

Impact your world

Since deadly tornadoes devastated his community last week, Mayfield, Kentucky resident Shawn Triplett has been working with friends, neighbors and donors to help get Christmas toys to the children of families affected by the storm. Triplett, a former Marine who served three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, organized a donation drive through social media, and has since moved the project to GoFundMe. He and other volunteers will wrap and distribute the toys, like those above, for any child or family in need.

If you want to learn more about ways to help the victims of last week's storms, visit here.

Rec of the week

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9 cozy blankets you'll want to curl up in all winter

The weather is finally cooling down, and if you're in need of a new blanket to snuggle up in, you're in luck. From light fleeces to chunky knits, here are nine of the coziest, comfiest blankets we've tried this year.