the Christmas Song Rant

It's that time of year again. It will happen seven or eight times between now and January. I'll be out shopping. The stores will be playing their usual blend of more-or-less hokey Christmas music. A new song comes on, and at the first words I tense up: "Have Yourself..." I can't help it. My ears are pricked, my mind derailed from whatever it was doing a minute ago. I just have to listen till I know. "...a merry little Christmas, / Let your heart be light." The next two words will determine my mood for the next 90 seconds. If I hear "From now on," I will roll my eyes, sniff a little, and frown while I shop and compose more of this rant in my head. But if perchance the words should be "Next year," I will smile with delighted surprise, and there will be a little more bounce in my step as I walk the aisles. They're actually playing the good version! I might even buy something extra from the store, as a reward for their good taste (I'm all about irrational recompense.)

I bet some of you didn't even know there were two versions of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." Wikipedia will tell you everything you need to know about it. Suffice it to say, the original version (well, the second original version... Judy Garland put the kibosh on the original original) is a sweet, melancholy song, filled with the homesickness that marks all the best Christmas songs of the 20th century. The rewrite is a bunch of glib, saccharine tripe, filled with the tinselly hyper-optimism that marks all the other ones.

Not that I feel strongly about it.

I'm not going to talk about "the real meaning of Christmas"-- much. For my money, there's no subject more pregnant with poetry than this one idea: "God is born." But you don't have to sing about that. You can sing about home and family; you can sing about snow, though I'm going to have to ask you not to write any more songs about it; you can sing about winter, especially if you tie it to themes of death and rebirth or something nice and archetypical; you can sing about peace on earth and goodwill to men. But your songs about home and family will be most convincing if you're singing about how much you miss them, and your songs about peace on earth and goodwill to men will be most authentic if they recognize the ubiquity of war and hatred.

The other song I have a rant about it "What Child is This?" Last year I spent four hours searching iTunes for a recording which had the original second-verse chorus. A few of them include the proper third-verse chorus, instead of repeating "This, this is Christ the King" for all three verses, but none I could find had the second-verse. For those who haven't heard it, it goes like this:

Nails, spear shall pierce him through
The cross be borne for me, for you;
Hail, hail the Word made flesh
The Babe, the son of Mary.

According to Wikipedia, this verse is typically left out "due to the rather unfestive content." I ask you, what's so unfestive about crucifixion?

Okay, bad question. Let me rather ask, Why does being festive mean pretending nothing bad happens? This is the real problem I have with the secularization of Christmas. A church festival is a celebration of an event in the past, and the implications it continues to have. So is nearly any other annual festival. In this way, most days we celebrate can allow for almost any mood and circumstance. Independence Day can be celebrated while we're at war, or in a depression. The tone of our celebration may vary, it may indeed be bitter, angry, or pained; but there's still a lot to say and think and feel about our country, and it's a day to do that. Even a birthday allows for melancholy, if that is what reflecting on one's life and aging arouses that year.

Christmas, though-- if it's not about the birth of Jesus, then no one seems to know what it is about. "Family, peace, goodwill" seem to be the best people can come up with... but these are unstable and elusive elements. How do you celebrate family if you can't stand to be near them, or if one of them has just died? How do you celebrate peace on earth with your eyes open? You can just manage it, if you focus on small graces, if you make up your mind to celebrate the isolated, illuminated moments where peace and goodwill are manifest amid the ugliness. But if you try to do it without acknowledging the ugliness, you just sound like you're kidding yourself and us.

And if you do acknowledge the ugliness, suddenly you're "not in the Christmas spirit." You're supposed to be happy at Christmas. Otherwise you join the ranks of lonely or cynical people that they make movies about, isolated from all the Christmas cheer, either wistfully making the best of it or grouchily Scroogeing everybody you can. (The people in the movies always find love, of course. Which only makes you feel worse.) You're not part of Christmas anymore, you're part of anti-Christmas.

Do what you like. If you want to keep writing and playing sappy tinsel-songs, that's your prerogative. If you want to spend one day of the year kidding yourself that all's right with the world, be my guest. But you will be doing yourself a favor if you find some other, stronger meaning to hang your Christmas on, something that will not evaporate one year when things become difficult. If you don't like my meaning, there are others you can try.

This is what my Christmas hangs on: And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory. / And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not comprehended it. It is stirring to me, it is chilling. It encompasses family and love; it encompasses peace and charity; it encompasses the haunting beauty of winter and death and birth. And some year, when I have none of these things, when I am alone and desolate and heartbroken, it will still stand, the Word made flesh, the last thing I have to hold to. It is a song I can sing any day, any year.