“We do Christmas differently every year, & the more honesty comes forward as to how we feel, the better we fit with the holiday. No one is forced to be celebratory, if it’s not flowing. I like to focus on what still shimmers within: a memory, an image, a story. I learned a lot, this week, about the evolution of my family’s fondness for certain things, as well as their dislikes of the season. But also, I was queried. Yesterday, as we gathered our fire wood, piece by piece, making new stacks & stashes for colder days, a small speaker was placed in the doorway of the shed, and a playlist selected. We worked outdoors amidst the wafting of sentimental classics, in a drizzle at times, for snow did not make it to our side of the mountain. “What does this music make you feel?” one of my children asked. It was a lovely, disarming question. As I continued in silence, to lift and throw, I pondered this. “World War II” I said, which was not exactly an answer. But, truthfully, I realized, Bing Crosby crooning “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” was attached to my mother, who passed last December. The 1943 rendition with full orchestra, likely recorded in one take, was deeply, painfully poignant, for her generation. She would have been a high school student at the time, shipped off from Britain to Canada, to be reared by strangers, in a safer location. Her father, and brother, had stayed in Manchester, England, to endure the war. I have a history with this Christmas music, because of her, & what it must have been like to be so far from home, not in a foxhole exactly, but as bafflingly close as a young girl could be at the time. Bing’s grandiose, stylized, seamless delivery will always bring my 1st generation immigrant status into the spotlight. Quintessentially American, and yet globally involved: an enormous feat of both optimism and realism, all folded into one. The next playlist, was piano jazz, according to Vince Guaraldi, and his “Charlie Brown’s Christmas” soundtrack. This now jettisoned me toward my father, an excellent performer of this oeuvre, if I can pull that rabbit out of its hat. Probably he played it for us, both on the hi-fi, as well as live, on his piano, a pristine Yamaha upright that now lives in Studio One, here at Pepperbox. What do I feel? I feel like the string of lights on my tree, a pass through of electricity still arcing across centuries of displacement, and ardor. I feel the emptiness of their unfulfilled dreams, as well as the romantic fervor that rode them, to make, well ... all of us who followed. And the wartime. It’s ironic flavor is like a stab in the heart, even today, especially today, and not far flung at all. Are we not all a melting pot tribe of truants at this point? Clinging to identifiers, but confused as to why? So this erasure that the holidays afford us, these times when we can be alike, happy, unhappy, brilliant or dull, yet each equally spellbound by the twinkling lights on our main streets, besotted with egg nog, or whispered to by advent gnomes roaming the farmyard at midnight, honestly, who would not want to be wrapped up in such a cloth? Me, you say, I’m definitely not into it. Maybe. But if we were to gather by a freshly cut balsam tree in the dark forest, doves fluttering & knocking clouds of snow onto our heads, with candles lit branch to branch, burning seemingly without wax, or wires ... I would feel closer to you, and you to me, closer than we normally do, say, in a super market line, or at the drug store. Okay, that’s my Christmas story, and I’m sticking to it. Merry Christmas! ”
