Brad Hambrick writes about listening well.
There are some good points about the difference between listening as a friend or a counsellor: ” a friend listens as a participant in your story while a counsellor listens as an observer of your story.”
From the post:

The Practice of Listening
No instruction can create or replace desire. The main skill in being a good listener is wanting to be a good listener. The core of listening is placing enough value on the other person and what he/she is saying that you quit playing your thoughts (mentally or verbally) over theirs. When you begin to do this you will find that your responses and body language almost always draw out the other person. The skills below [in the post] are merely examples of things that value other people.

Read the whole post at Brad Hambrick.

I’d heard of Mannheim Steamroller, but didn’t know a thing about them.
Apparently they’ve recorded heaps and heaps of Christmas music.
Of course that includes O Come, O Come Emmanuel.

Today’s O Come, O Come Emmanuel is by the late Whitney Houston.
It demonstrates a measure of her skill as a vocalist relying more on control than histrionics.

https://wp.me/puEkf-7ab

This ad for Google Assistant features the grown up Kevin McAllister (performed again by Macaulay Culkin) and demonstrates how pretty common tech these days would have made all his Home Alone hijinks redundant.
It also seems that Kevin still lives with his parents.