Artwork by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
As we were trimming the tree last weekend, my wife asked me to bring in the laptop so we could listen to Christmas music. I complied—as any trained husband will—and set up the sound system in our dining room. And so we trimmed the tree and drank some wine and listened to our favorite holiday playlist. We do have a pretty nice variety of Christmas albums: Esquivel, The Ventures, The Roches, Jon Batiste, Diana Krall, Brian Setzer, Frank Sinatra, and, of course, Bing. We also have a more eclectic Pottery Barn collection including Ella, Eartha Kitt, Louis Armstrong, and Etta James. Of course, some of the old favorites were different renditions of the same tune—there are only so many Christmas songs.
As we listened, I began to notice that, despite the joyous nature of the season, an underlying current of melancholy flowed through most of the music. Of course, the goofy songs like Winter Wonderland and Frosty the Snowman and Sleighride and Jingle Bells are all fun, but, technically, they’re not even really Christmas songs. I guess they might be categorized as winter songs. There are a couple goofy yuletide tunes like Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer and Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, but most of the others deal with spiritual aspects of the season—both religious and secular—with a much more serious tone.
The sacred songs Joy to the World and Hark the Herald Angels Sing are exceptions, enthusiastically proclaiming the birth of our savior—the ode Joy to the World is that and only that, an exclamation of bliss and wonder. Other hymns, though, like Away in a Manger, Star of Wonder, and O, Come Emanuel seem—to me at least—to have patinas of sorrow attached to them. Or I might simply be mistaking sadness for awe and wonder—or shock and awe.
This pensive yuletide tone seems more obvious in secular pieces like Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Christmas Time is Here, I’ll Be Home for Christmas, and White Christmas. The messages of the songs here don’t deal with birth and renewal, even on the metaphoric level, but with loss and longing. One expresses the desire for Christmas the way it used to be, yearning for “golden days of yore”. Another dreams of home, of a white Christmas “just like the ones I used to know” and yet another asserts the speaker will be home for Christmas, “if only in my dreams.” While the lyrics of Christmas Time is Here talk about “happiness and cheer” and of “love and dreams to share”, the melody conveys so much of a melancholic sense as to seem almost ironic.
Why is there such a pronounced current of nostalgia within these revered songs? Have our lives gone so sour that we have to gaze upon our past Christmases as the best we’ll ever have? Or are we longing for the innocence of our lost childhoods? Some years, I have a hard time breaking into the Christmas spirit until late in the season, if at all. And looking back on my childhood and the traditions of paging through the Sears and J.C. Penney Christmas catalogs and watching the Rankin-Bass Christmas specials, visiting Santa and all the rest of it, I realize it was all good back then, that being a kid at this time of year was great. With great age comes great responsibilities. And all that adult realization makes us—at the very least—cynical. No, Virginia, it’s not as good as it used to be. And I miss it.
The holidays are supposed to be a time to get together with friends and relatives, to celebrate family, faith, and peace on Earth. It is a time for boys and girls to dream of sweets, presents, Santa, and all wonders of the season, and a time for parents to enjoy and indulge their children. Why, if the present-day holidays are so beautiful, so satisfying, and so joyous, then why do the songs we love look so longingly to the golden age of our past?
What draws us to the sad music, especially this time of year? Perhaps it’s because of a feeling we get that evokes sympathy for others, something we know we should be experiencing this time of year. Most psychologists agree that appreciating feelings of sadness in the arts is a way to cope with our own negative emotions, and that sometimes it can help us rid ourselves of these unpleasant feelings through vicarious experience, or, conversely, might help us understand and strengthen their own emotional vocabulary.
The holidays can be a time of stress for those of us without family or friends; it can also be an incredibly anxious time for those with family and friends—the presents, events, shopping, visits to Santa, decorating, cooking, arranging, and the expense of it all can bring many of us close to the breaking point, both emotionally and financially. It’s too bad that so much of Christmas is focused on the commercial side of the equation.
Perhaps if we concentrated more on spiritual aspects of the holiday, religious or secular, that focus on good will, peace, love, and harmony, we might not become so wistful and nostalgic for those days of Christmas past when everything was so blissful, sweet, and perfect because—of course, that world only existed within the sensibilities of a child. Which is where, perhaps, the music is leading us—back to the innocence and purity a youth most of us never experienced.
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