Eclectic Company: Holidays Are Here Again

Back in the Spring, I led a workshop on holiday songs at a Folk Music Society of New York weekend, and I racked up an impressive list of celebratory days for which there are songs. Turns out my artist sister Alli’s birthday is also “Belly Laugh Day,” clearly a day for jollification, while my own birthday is “Old Tax Day” and not so pleasant. The small crowd of us had loads of fun remembering snatches of songs for all the occasions, and that kept us amused enough to consider doing it again. Of course, there are some favorite holidays and favorite holiday songs, but we note that no holiday songs are sung irrespective of their season, unless they’re purposefully recalled as an academic (or entertainment) exercise, or unless they’re found on CD, on TV, in a play or movie that might be enjoyed at another time. In fact, if you are caught enjoying holiday music out of season, your sanity is seriously reconsidered.

This is also the only time of year in which we speak of the holiday season. When most of you say the season, you mean the extended celebration of Christmas, from the first signs of decorated streets, storefronts, and lit-up grand homes that ends with sad trees at the curb dropping their needles and trailing tinsel. But what I mean when I say it is that time of holiday after holiday after holiday in close succession. In a few weeks, beginning at sundown on December 8th, we Jews will be celebrating Hanukkah, a minor holiday in our annual calendar, but since it falls near Christmas, and is a celebration in which children receive gifts (daily, for eight days!), it’s lumped in with the gift-giving season that begins on Thanksgiving (a family and food and football holiday for which I am truly grateful, and which I’m celebrating in Edinburg, Texas this year). Christmas of course is as always on December 25th, and Kwanzaa, a recently-created (by Dr. Maulana Karenga, Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at California State University Long Beach) holiday celebrating African-American and Pan African family, community and cultural values, begins on December 26th and is celebrated for seven days. Other holidays including the Islamic New Year and the Buddhist religion’s Bodhi Day on which Siddhartha achieved enlightenment, and the Chinese New Year also fall, approximately, during the two-month season that encircles the Winter Solstice. But I digress.

After googling and musing on holidays and holiday songs, the POSSLQ and I realized that only Christmas is associated with a substantial body of music – enough songs in fact to keep some radio stations busy during the entire Xmas season, from the first sales on Black Friday through the end of January, when the return and re-buy department store Christmas sales finally wind down for a few months. Which is why I wish I knew the tune for Kathy Kamen Goldmark’s song “It’s Gonna Be A Credit Card Christmas Again” from her fabulous novel And My Shoes Keep Walking Back To You and would like to find myself singing along under my breath and sometimes out loud when shopping from November through January. If you don’t have a collection of Christmas music on CD, you can get your own fix from the radio. We’ve had “all Christmas songs all the time” stations available in Lake Charles for years now, and I never have trouble finding a Christmas channel when I’m in the mood for “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer,” by the Irish Rovers, or “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” by everyone from Mariah Carey to Cee Lo Green!

Considering our own childhood observances, the POSSLQ reviewed the religious and secular songs he knows, and concluded with some surprise that the Christmas songs he prefers are the religious ones, such as “Adeste Fidelis,” “Silent Night” and “Hark The Herald Angels Sing.” We’re both Jewish by birth, but he (brought up Reform in California) grew up with Christmas while I (brought up Orthodox in New York) did not. As a member of Oxford University’s New College, I’m filled with pride when the award-winning and world famous College boys’ choir (they sang at Diana’s marriage to Charles and at her funeral) releases a new CD of classical religious Christmas music. But as a great lover of emotional and weepy songs, I’m a big fan of a certain type of secular Christmas music, starting with Jewish composer Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” as sung in the movie of the same name by Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Allen. I can’t get enough of that movie, or of the close harmony that the costumed quartet uses on my sentiments to great effect. A couple of years ago I met up with a few new Christmas songs not available on radio that fall right in to that category: “Christmas All Year Long” by Pamela Phillips Oland and performed by Erica Gimpel in a Christmas episode of one of my favorite TV series, JAG is one, and “Christmas Angel” sung by Sue Matsuki on the compilation Christine Lavin Presents Just One Angel is another. I’m sure you could recommend a dozen more (or two).

This will be the first time the POSSLQ and I spend the Christmas season together (last year he visited with granddaughter Emily and son David in Phoenix, texting and emailing and calling me throughout), so I’ll have lots of opportunities to take the remotes from him. Let’s see which one of us gets tired of the other’s fave seasonal songs. I’m betting I can get him to like Dar Williams’ “Christians and Pagans” and I can count on singing “Adeste Fideles” in Latin and English on many car rides, wrapped up snugly in our fake furry winter hats and coats, on our way to singing sessions and parties for the holiday season.

Correction: Last issue, in writing about a performance by fiddler Kenny Kosek, I mistakenly conflated Swedish and Hardanger fiddle styles. Hardanger is a Norwegian style, and Sweden gives us, among many other things, the polska (yes, polka with an “s” and no, they’re not at all related styles). Kosek mentioned Hardanger but when my back was briefly turned, he began playing something haunting and moving and Swedish, that I'm pretty sure was not a polska. Beautifully. Mea culpa.

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