I hate to admit it, but for four or five years now I've been slowly turning into one of those people who feel depressed at the approach of Christmas. Still, I usually find that I snap out of it, more or less, by the time the day itself arrives–if I don't feel so very good, I at least stop feeling bad, and even rise to mild cheerfulness. This year I didn't make much attempt to talk myself out of it or fight it, but just accepted that this is the way it is now.
My wife and I seriously considered not getting a tree. She's been leaning that way for a while, as most of our children are far away, and our local grandchildren would not be at our house for more than a few days of the two weeks or so that are generally encompassed in the term "the holidays." So the two of us would for the most part be the only "audience" for it, and in that case was it really worth the trouble? Left to her own devices I think she would not have had one, but I can't quite bear to let the custom go. We decided to compromise by getting a small one, so on the Saturday two weeks before Christmas I went off to Fish River Trees while she worked on the deep carpet of cypress needles and sycamore leaves that covered the yard.
Some years ago my late friend Robert sent me a mixtape that included a lot of pre-rock-and-roll Christmas music by people like Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. I've never been very fond of secular Christmas-pop songs like "The Christmas Song" (aka "Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire"), and the truth is that much of the material on that tape struck me as cheesy. But for several years while we still had children at home I played it in the car on the way to the tree farm. And I learned to like the Sinatra album with which it began, A Jolly Christmas. In time I bought the CD, and when my youngest child was still at home, and it was sometimes just the two of us going to get the tree, it was a bit of a tradition for us to hear it on the way there and back, not without a certain irony produced by the old-fashioned swingin' '50s way in which it starts off: a jazzy re-working of "Jingle Bells" which includes a group of background singers in an upbeat chant of "I love those j-i-n-g-l-e bells–OH!–those holiday j-i-n-g-l-e bells."
I wasn't sure whether I wanted to listen to it the other day. I thought it might just be sad. But I decided to do it anyway, and if it made me feel sad about past Christmases, well, I would just wallow in it.
And it did turn out to be a bit of a wallow, not for anything personal to me, but for what has been lost in our culture since 1957, when the album was recorded. This is not a desire to "return to the 1950s", as is generally charged against anyone who feels any sort of nostalgia for the time. There were certainly a great many things wrong with American life at the time, and we can be glad that some of them have been corrected. But only a fool–well, an old fool or a young person who doesn't know any better–can fail to see that in many significant ways American culture is now meaner, cruder, dumber, more dishonest, and vastly more cynical than it was then. You may argue that on the whole things are better; fine, I might even agree with you, depending on what's in front of me at the moment. But still: something has been lost. Much has been lost, in fact. It seems inevitable that mankind will always throw out babies along with bath water, and steer clear of Scylla only to be dragged under by Charybdis.
The Sinatra album is an instance. It's about evenly divided between secular pop Christmas songs (why is "Jingle Bells" even considered a Christmas song, anyway?) and carols. The carols are truncated, made to fit the two-and-a-half-minute strait jacket of the popular music of the time, but are simply and tastefully arranged (by Gordon Jenkins) and presented with an unforced respect, even reverence. A word comes to mind, a somewhat casual word which acknowledges that some things are better than others in ways that ought be obvious to all, not as profound moral truths but as a matter of a properly formed sense of what is decent and appropriate: "class," as in "classy." It has a bad and laughable sense, as used by people who lack the thing itself, in which it refers to something meretricious, something marked by an insincere or misguided attempt to appropriate class: "Let's put an "e" on "old" to give it more class." But in its good sense it signifies respect for that which actually has merit, for a certain dignity and grace: "The losing team showed its class by congratulating the winners."
The Sinatra album has class, which is something we don't often get from popular music today, and I ended up listening to the CD five or six times over the past few weeks, and deciding that I like it quite a lot.
I kept returning to one song, one of the pop-Christmas songs that I've heard for most of my life and never paid much attention to: "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas." This is an odd little song. The title, which begins and ends the lyric, seems somewhere between wry and spiteful. The whole thing is subdued, almost somber, wistful, and a little mysterious. You have the sense that something is going on, something not explicitly referred to, and that the hopeful words ("From now on our troubles will be out of sight") may be in defiance of that something, or at least relief that it's over. And the music is definitely melancholy, and far from jolly. But then in the next to last line the melody ascends where it had descended, so that "Hang a shining star upon the highest bough" becomes a cry of hope.
The song comes from the musical Meet Me In St. Louis, and until tonight I didn't know what its context in the drama is. I could have found out easily enough, but had very deliberately not yet done so because I like the ambiguity of it, and the sense of its being extracted from a conversation we haven't heard.
So just now I did look it up, and now its melancholy makes perfect sense. It was in fact as originally written resisted by Judy Garland, who was to sing it in the original play, and others because they found it depressing. You can read the whole story of its revisions here; "depressing" it certainly was in the original:
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
It may be your last
!!
The lyrics were revised heavily for the play, but the next-to-last line remained "Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow." This was replace by the shining star for Sinatra, who thought muddling through wasn't quite the touch he wanted in his "jolly Christmas" album. And though one might decry it as bowdlerization I think in this case the late revision really makes the song. At the moment it's certainly my favorite of the pop-Christmas repertoire.
All my quirky personal reactions aside, by the way, I can recommend this album to anyone who has any taste at all for this kind of music. Sinatra's voice was in its golden cello-like prime, and Gordon Jenkins was a top-notch arranger.
The tree turned out very nicely, by the way. It's only five feet tall, small enough that all but a few inches of it fit into the trunk of my Honda Civic, and light enough that I can pick it up with one hand: easily set up, and it will be easily taken down, but still bringing a sufficient amount of greenery, colored lights, and glittering ornaments, to the living room.
*
Now that the 52 Albums project is over, there will probably be more discussion of music in this post. For instance: here is a Christmas playlist put together by Sigur Rós for BBC Radio 6. I don't see that it has anything to do with Christmas, but those who like the band will probably like at least some of the music. I know I'll be looking for more music by some of the artists represented. And at the very beginning you get to hear the voice of Sigur Rós herself. As fans of the band know, she is the sister of Jónsi, the band's vocalist, and she was only a few days old when the band was formed in 1994. So now she's twenty-three and introducing the band's playlist on the radio. It's interesting to hear the way she pronounces her name. I wouldn't have recognized it.
*
Speaking of 52 Things: as we discussed over the past week or two, this year it will be 52 Poems, appearing on Thursdays. I have something in mind for this week. Beyond that it's open. I said in that discussion that I would have specifications for the format, because formatting poetry for the web can be difficult. But after doing some experimenting I think that may not be necessary. We'll see. For now you can just send the poems in a Word or Word-compatible format, or in plain text. Or you can just send me a link, if the text is online, which is quite likely. So you can send me things whenever you want. If I have nothing by Wednesday morning, I'll supply a poem. If I have more than one I'll post them in the order received. And if two people send the same poem…well, I guess we'll cross that bridge if we come to it. Should I post a "dibs" list? Did anyone ever consult those in the past?
Also, I'm not soliciting original poems, or publishing any of mine. No offense but I just don't want to be in that position.
*
Sunset, Christmas Day. 
Best wishes to all for a happy new year.
Light On Dark Water 
Leave a comment