The best Christmas songs are tinged with melancholy. I don't mean the Christmas carols, the great boisterous shouts of "Joy to the World" or "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." I mean the popular songs. The best ones are a bit sad.
It took me years to understand "I'll Be Home for Christmas," but it finally registered the first year I wasn't. I was sitting in an empty restaurant in Washington, D.C., when the last line hit me: "I'll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams." Up to then that little qualification hadn't been important. Of course I'll be home for Christmas. Even if I-94 snows over and I have to follow the ruts. Of course I'll be home. Where else would I be?
"Silver Bells" is a warm mug of a song, and it's not particularly sad in its lyrics — it's a bit banal. Ring a ding, hear them ring. Really wore out the rhyming dictionary on that one, didn't they? But it has a sense of quiet contemplation of other people doing things, rushing around. It's like someone recollecting a perfect hectic day in the week before Christmas.
There's nothing melancholic about "White Christmas," but the Bing Crosby version (sorry, but there is no other) has the sound of a culture that seems to recede farther away with each year. "Just like the ones I used to know" suggests we haven't known them lately, that the perfect Christmases are always in the past.
Perhaps they are.
I turn off the radio when the modern songs come on. I do not want to rock around the Christmas tree. It's in the corner. One cannot circumnavigate it while rocking. Or: "Here comes Santa Claus. Here comes Santa Claus. Right down Santa Claus Lane." What kind of egomaniac names the main street in the company town after himself? "Jingle Bell Rock" is a novelty song that should've lasted a year, maybe two, but gets resuscitated every year because of tradition.
But the good old songs, they land just right. The other day the radio played "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." It was released in 1944, which gives the lyrics added poignancy. The boys were still oversea, in peril: "Someday soon we all will be together / If the fates allow / Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow / So have yourself a merry little Christmas now."
That's life: We muddle through somehow. We look past the day, past the gossamer curtain between Dec. 31 and the fresh slate of January: "Next year all our troubles will be miles away." So we hope and we sing, knowing there's no such guarantee.
But we resolve to have a merry little Christmas anyway. The great big Christmases are exhausting. The little ones you can carry a long time.
A happy child in the church choir, the plate of the Swedish meatballs and a sheaf of lefse, a bygone dog who wore reindeer antlers, the even and settled satisfaction you feel in the waning hours of the 25th. You could carry those moments through the year, but we don't. We clear the decks and realign to New Year's. And then we are just done with all this stuff.
Come June, you might be vacuuming the living room and move a table, and find a small ersatz cranberry from a strand that popped off when you struck the tree. The grass will be green and the sun will be high, but maybe you'll think: Someday soon we all will be together. Again. In the cold and dark time, lighting a fire with the tinder of all our recollections.
