My Most Special Occasion

Can you believe I started this silly little blog 30 days ago? I guess that makes this a special occasion, which brings me to today's topic. . . .

Christmas, my favorite holiday. I've always felt this way, although I have friends for whom Christmastime is the worst time of the year -- the commercialism, the pressure to buy gifts, the same incessant carols. What should be the most special time of the year becomes a nightmare for them. I'm not sure how I've managed to avoid this mindset. Maybe it's because the memory of my first Christmases still have the power to reduce me to an eight-year-old. My little sister would wake up in the dark on Christmas morning and shake me until my eyeballs rattled. Then we'd crack open the bedroom door, and behold -- it looked as if Santa's sleigh had crashed into our living room and left his entire planet's worth of presents scattered all around the tree. Then she'd stand in our parents' doorway and inform them that it was time to get up. If she'd had a military bugle, she couldn't have been more effective.

My sister was a tiny terror come December. One year, my parents had our family doctor phone us on Christmas Eve pretending to be Santa. He didn't time it quite right, as the two of us had already been in our twin beds for about an hour. When our mom walked in and woke us up to say that Santa was on the phone, my sister, whose bed was farther from the door than mine, tore out of the bedroom as fast as she could. She couldn't be bothered with making a detour around my bed; she trampled right over it -- and me -- to reach the phone first. I still have little footprints on my stomach.

Because we lived in Miami in the early 1960s, we had a silver tree like many other families we knew. Silver trees had their advantages -- for one thing, you didn't need to drape tinsel all over them because that was redundant. The best advantage was the color wheel, which was to a silver tree what strings of colored lights are to a real tree. The color wheel used electricity, and when our parents plugged it in, its motor hummed as the wheel slowly revolved, casting red, blue, green, and orange lights onto the branches. The Miami equivalent of a roaring fire was a color wheel illuminating its silver tree in the dark. These days, both the tree and the wheel are considered to be anachronistic kitsch, but they'll always be my anachronistic kitsch.

I think it was 1990 when I first encountered a grownup -- my boss, actually -- who never listened to Christmas music. In fact, he hated it and wouldn't allow me to play it on my office radio. How could anyone not like "Silent Night" or "Silver Bells" or "Greensleeves"? Maybe it was those other songs that had turned him into such a musical Grinch, songs such as "Jingle Bells" (particularly as rendered by barking dogs), "All I Want for Christmas (Is My Two Front Teeth)," those vermin Frosty and Rudolph (and let's not forget Nestor the Christmas Donkey), and the ultimate offender, "The Twelve Days of Christmas." That's probably what did it. I suspect that when he was younger he got as far as the four calling birds before hurling the record like a discus through the nearest window.

When I was growing up, Andy Williams was considered to be the voice of Christmas cheer, with his holiday specials that always included the Osmond Brothers, who never seemed to appear anywhere else. "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" was Williams' yuletide anthem, and back then it never occurred to me that it might not be the most wonderful time of the year for everyone. That revelation would come later in life. These days, when I think of Christmas music, I think of Amy Grant, whose beautiful collections of songs and carols, not to mention her annual holiday tour, represent for me and many others the real music of the holiday. Her song "Tennessee Christmas" can make me forget I've never been there. Other Christmas songs she's recorded that I enjoy are "Breath of Heaven" (whichh Grant co-wrote) and "My Grownup Christmas List" (which she didn't write).

Besides Amy Grant's music, there are other annual favorites I always pull out, some of which are a traditional part of my present because they were part of my past. These days, my absolute favorite song is "A Baby Changes Everything," originally recorded by Faith Hill. Shivers and chills. My mandatory playlist also includes "The Chipmunk Song" (don't say a word about my Chipmunks), "River" (you really have to hear Robert Downey Jr. sing it on the Ally McBeal Christmas soundtrack -- this was back when he hadn't yet exorcised his demons, and that makes it all the more heartbreaking), Dolly Parton's "Hard Candy Christmas," Brett Williams' "My Christmas" (so hard to find it on CD, though; I was present at Calvary Chapel in Everett, Washington, when he performed it for the first time), and CDs by Ray Conniff (this is the true miracle of Christmas -- me listening to the Ray Conniff Singers), Sarah McLachlin, She and Him, the Roches, and others. (One note about Conniff -- his 1959 album Christmas with Conniff includes the very pretty song "Christmas Bride," which I always loved. Yet I've never heard it performed by any other artist, even though its authorship is "Traditional.")

I agree that the holiday has become way too commercialized. I've seen Christmas commercials as early as September (and next year perhaps on the Fourth of July). Jesus might be "the reason for the season" in other cultures, but here in the U.S. it's the newest Chia Pet. So I'm with Charlie Brown and Linus on this one. I think we're all indoctrinated at an early age (my generation took Santa sliding down a snowy hill on a Norelco shaver for granted), and it's hard to break free of all that initial brainwashing. I've learned to accept Madison Avenue's assault on our traditional values as something to be amused by and then promptly ignore. This takes practice, but it can be done.

However -- however -- there is one new wrinkle in all this commercialization that is absolutely making my blood boil, and I should have seen it coming: Christmas shopping on Thanksgiving night. Why otherwise sane Americans would risk being anywhere near a store on Black Friday itself (it seems Walmart in particular has become the new American Pamplona) beats me. But don't even tell me people are going to leave their homes on a day set aside for food, family, and football to go Christmas shopping while still in the stuporous throes of turkey-induced Tryptophan. (Actually, that's a medical myth; chicken has more Tryptophan than turkey does. What we suffer from on Thanksgiving is called "overeating.") It's bad enough that people are willing to cut short one of the most special days of the year to go shopping, but what about those poor retail employees who have to be there? I'm sure they receive some sort of extra compensation for their sacrifice (at least they'd better), but it shouldn't even have to be an option. That's beyond shameful; it's inhumane.

*** BREAKING NEWS ***

Just as I started wondering how long I could keep cranking these posts out six days a week, a friend yesterday mentioned that she was having trouble keeping up with so many. So that pretty much made my mind up for me. I'm going to cut back to just Mondays and Thursdays; that should keep my brain cells fresh. So see you next week!