It wasn’t until I’d heard Andy Williams sing “Happy Holidays” for perhaps the 1,829th time in my life, earlier this month, that I finally realized he wasn’t singing “happy holidays” at all, but, rather, “Happy Holiday.” Singular! Which actually makes perfect sense, given that in the 1960s, when Williams recorded the song, nobody in Christian America gave two hoots about cutting Jews in on the action. Kwanzaa was still a newborn, and other religions and cultures barely registered in the national consciousness.
This just-concluding holiday season also was the one in which I finally reached the breaking point with Jimmy Durante’s menacing rendition of “Frosty the Snowman,” dating from the shoddily animated 1969 TV special. Durante’s take always had sounded dark to me, like a come-on from an old drunk with bad intent who was trying to lure kids onto his lap. But this particular December I was singularly struck by the way Durante bit off the word “village” in the line “Down to the village with a broomstick in his hand”—as if the village really was a circle of hell, and the singer’s pants were what was down.
OK, OK, so Jimmy Durante wasn’t much of a singer, he was croaking out the words as best he could, and, at any rate, he’s long dead and in no position to defend himself against my charges of prurience and vulgarity. But my point is, when you listen to as much Christmas music as I do every December, you end up noticing certain things and forming some pretty strong opinions.
In the DC area, the radio station WASH-FM switches, around Thanksgiving, from an adult contemporary format to all Christmas music, all the time, through December 25th. While I almost never listen to the station the rest of the year, I tend to tune it in pretty frequently during the Christmas season, especially when I’m in the car.
I’m not exactly sure why. Nearly every song is either hideously sentimental or profoundly pious, and the change in format sadly does not correspond to any alteration in corporate radio’s genre-neutral commitment to play the same handful of songs into the ground. Add to that the fact that, as a commercial radio station, WASH-FM is washed clean of any music at all for huge chunks of time during its frequent advertising blocs, and you’d think all of it would be more than enough to send an aging secular snob like me scurrying to the safety of my local NPR station, the classic rock outlet, or the indie-music CDs in my collection that make me feel like I’m not totally the stereotypical Bethesda baby boomer who shuns everything but public radio, all-news WTOP-FM and the music of his youth.
But damn if Christmas music doesn’t just make me feel good. (Generally speaking, that is—when it’s not evoking child molestation.) “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” makes me feel like doing just that, however many times I hear it. When Burl Ives urges me to have “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” I’m frankly pretty inclined to oblige. I’m right there with Elvis when he despairs of his “blue, blue, blue, blue Christmas.” Many’s the time I’ve sat at a traffic light “a-rum-bum-bum-bum”ing along with “The Little Drummer Boy.” When Ol’ Blue Eyes croons “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” I nearly scan the neighborhood for signs of the fat man.
Talk about the music of my youth! Much of Christmas music’s appeal obviously is nostalgia, as many if not most of the songs date back to my childhood or even before it. Bing Crosby’s version of “White Christmas” had been a staple of the suburban hi-fi, after all, for at least a decade before I was even born. When my family gathered at my maternal grandparents’ tidy brick house on Long Island in the 1960s, the same Harry Simeon Chorale version of “The Little Drummer Boy” that still gets most of the Yuletide airplay was as much a part of our holiday as were the German-made crèche on the mantle, the scent of roast chicken and red cabbage in the kitchen, and my grandmother’s lebkuchen on the dessert tray. Every time I hear Elvis’s version of “Here Comes Santa Claus,” I’m reminded of happy December hours spent playing pool at a North Carolina bar I frequented in my 20s that featured an awesome jukebox of holiday tunes.
(A quick aside here. It’s always struck me as odd that Santa Claus would live on Santa Claus Lane. Doesn’t that seem more than a little self-aggrandizing for such a seemingly modest old toymaker? Why, I doubt even Oprah, who plasters her own mug on the cover of every issue of her eponymous O Magazine and in two days will debut the Oprah Winfrey Network on cable television, has named the street in front of her home Oprah Winfrey Lane. The other thing I find weird about “Here Comes Santa Claus” is its bizarre blend of secular and religious. I mean, sure, Santa Claus, that modern-day symbol of conspicuous consumption, started out as Saint Nicholas. But by 1957, when Elvis Presley was singing about him, Santa was fully emblematic of the crass, spiritually empty commercialization of Christmas that Charlie Brown would bemoan less than a decade later in an animated classic about the true meaning of the holiday. Consider the song’s closing lines: “So let’s give thanks to the Lord above/That Santa Claus comes tonight.” Isn’t that sort of like singing, “O little town of Bethlehem/The hopes and fears of all the years are dispelled by midnight madness at Best Buy”?)
Then, too, there’s a delightful innocence and unreality to Christmas music that can be so, so welcome at this depressing hour in our globe’s life. “Silent night, holy night” beats the bejesus (if you’ll pardon the expression) out of “mortar fire, holy sh*t!”, doesn’t it? Is it not better that a snowman should come to life, rather than some frankenfood that ultimately will kill us? “Let It Snow” indeed, as the beleaguered Earth continues warming and the polar ice caps keep melting.
Not that happy and hopeful Christmas songs are the only ones I like. It’s just that those are ones most likely to receive radio play. (Along with a few mixed-message tunes like The Kinks’ “Father Christmas”—a tale of thuggery that’s also an appeal to conscience.) In December, the boom box in our house and the CD player in my car are well-stocked with a variety of rock, country and pop Christmas music that runs a gamut of moods and emotions.
Perhaps my favorite Christmas CD of all time, compiled some years ago by friends of ours, features everything from Clarence Carter’s marvelously lewd “Back Door Santa,” to Buck Owens’ comically bereft “Blue Christmas Lights,” to John Prine’s near-bitter divorce saga “All the Best,” to the Pogues’ glorious “A Fairytale of New York.” That last song begins, in a world-weary croak , “It was Christmas eve, babe, in the drunk tank.”
Christmas Day itself isn’t that big a deal to me, and its passage isn’t particularly saddening. Christ’s birthday, arbitrarily assigned or not, hasn’t a ton of significance to an agnostic. I appreciate but certainly don’t need the presents. I do like giving gifts, but my choices are seldom so inspired that the presentations freeze in time as Hallmark moments.
But man, come December 26th, I do miss the music. I know I could keep playing the CDs anyway, and that, strictly speaking, songs like “Let It Snow” and “Winter Wonderland” conjure a season that’s scarcely begun. But the bottom line is, when WASH-FM resumes its usual programming, Andy Williams disappears from the airwaves, the Christmas tree we might once have rocked around is awaiting trash pickup at the curb, and the statute of limitations again has expired on jailing the late Jimmy Durante, it’s all over. Until the next happy holiday.
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