Until Friday morning, you could be pretty sure that anybody who was singing or playing Christmas carols was trying to sell you something.
But the Friday after Thanksgiving, as recognized by mothers around the civilized world, is the first day on which you are allowed to sing Christmas carols in the house.
This is the day sheet music, compact discs, cassettes, even those ancient vinyl records of Christmas music, come out of storage. Go ahead, hum a bar of “Deck the halls . . . ” It is the season.
To adults, those musical chestnuts at first may sound a little disconcerting. After a certain number of decades our seasonal clocks begin to run slow, and we are perpetually surprised by the date on the calendar. Moreover, that kind of overt cheeriness is suspect.
But to children, Christmas carols sound just right today, delightful rediscoveries, rich with tradition, brimming with hope and happiness.
That should tell us something. After all, in the secularized, homogenized, dumbed down and pumped up way our culture now celebrates holidays, Christmas carols are one of the few things that separates Dec. 25 from the rest of the parade of holidays.
Gift-giving? Isn’t that what Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Sweetest Day, Secretaries’ Day, Grandparents’ Day and Graduation Day are all about?
Food, drink, revelry? What holiday–or regular Saturday night, for that matter–isn’t already devoted to that?
More Top Picks Metal Polishs
A chance to rally the community, and lavish its wealth on a celebration of humankind’s universal fellowship? That’s Halloween, if Mayor Daley’s extravagant city marking of the day is any indication.
Inside churches, of course, and around dinner-table Advent wreaths, Christmas remains a distinct celebration of faith. Likewise, there are times and places where the Christian message should be handled with care, out of consideration for hundreds of thousands of Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and others in the Chicago area alone.
But the kind of pseudo-Christmas that bombards the general public should be offensive to those non-Christians and millions of area Christians alike. Though the generic red-and-green holiday is celebrated longer and more lavishly than ever, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish it from other occasions for ringing up the cash register.
Except for Christmas carols.
Carols come from a time, dating back to good King Wenceslaus and beyond, when the formal religious celebration of Christian holy days was complemented by popular songs outside church.
That tradition died away for most holidays. Despite all the blandness imposed on Christmas greetings and decorations and celebrations over the last few generations, however, despite all the symbols stripped away from this event, the songs haven’t disappeared.
Today, in some places, the lyrics to Christmas carols may be the most explicit reminder of what all the fuss is about. Institutions that would never dream of displaying a cross or a creche will still pipe the awe-struck query, “What child is this . . . ” over the loudspeaker.
It is not the lyrics that convey the spirit either. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, for instance, doesn’t have much to do with the nativity of Jesus.
But somehow the act of singing itself conveys something essential about the nature of Christmas. Singing in the dark, dead of winter is a defiant act. People without hope do not sing.
And no matter how much the music is abused, no matter how often it is hijacked for commercial purposes, it has not lost its joy.
Earlier this week a co-worker of mine was in a particularly (even for him) cantankerous mood. He had just walked much of North Michigan Avenue, and though he saw Christmas promoted everywhere, he declared that he saw Christ nowhere. He demanded to know what I was going to do about it.
Not exactly in the Christmas spirit myself, I suggested that he was only about 50 years late in making that discovery.
What I should have told him was to go back down to the avenue, stop looking and start listening.
Or better yet, when I see him in the office Friday morning, I’ll start his day with a little serenade that ought to answer his question, something I haven’t trotted out in 11 months or so: “God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay; remember Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day.’
———-
E-mail [email protected]