Coundown to Christmas: Grown-Up Christmas List

Countdown to Christmas: Merry Christmas, Darling

Because this song was released while we were still in Vietnam, I always heard it as being sung to a soldier there.

I've never been able to hear it in any other context.

Countdown to Christmas: Feliz Navidad

When I was much younger, I didn't see "new" songs as "real" Christmas songs.

But this one grew on me, and apparently the rest of the world, too.

And it hasn't been new for a long, long time now.

Countdown to Christmas: Bing and Bowie

I actually saw this bit of strangeness when it originally aired.

Now I own a classic Christmas anthology CD that contains the song.

Countdown to Christmas: Carol of the Bells

Once upon a time, music was important -- not just the music stored in our iPods (of which I still am not possessed), but the music we made.

When I was in elementary school, we had a music teacher. I don't remember her name, but I can't forget her presence: she was tall, blonde, beautiful -- the kind of woman for whom the adjective "willowy" was coined -- and once a week she wheeled her upright piano into our classroom for an hour or so of blessed relief from math and history: for an hour or so of song.

In junior high, chorus was an elective. I was there. This began my real life in song, a brief but mostly happy life. (I was going to scan my 8th grade yearbook, which contains the only known photo of me in a chorus, but I can't find it. More on my bitterness about lack of ocular proof later.) In 11th and 12th grade, I also took chorus as an elective. From the first week of school in September, we started practicing for the Christmas concert. While the leaves were falling outside, we practiced "Let It Snow." As people planned their Halloween costumes, we rehearsed "What Child is This?" Just before school broke for the brief Thanksgiving holiday, we put the finishing touches on "Carol of the Bells." Today as I absentmindedly sing along with classic Christmas songs, I still precisely pronounce that one line in "Angels We Have Heard on High" as "in egg shells cease day-oh" because that's how the music director told us to do it so it would come out sounding right...

In short, chorus was a major part of my young life, a major part of my adolescent identity. None of my regular crowd went out for chorus, so I had my primary friends and a chorus set of friends. Together we understood something that the others didn't, something I couldn't have articulated at the time, and still can't fully. But music, communal music, was an important creative outlet.

In high school, the top chorus was called the Choralairs. This was an elite group; one joined it only through audition. We in the school always knew when the Choralairs had an event: the boys wore suits and the girls wore their dresses: burnt orange suit-dresses.

How I craved owning one of those dresses.

In 11th grade, after a few years away from chorus, I made room in my schedule for a general chorus elective. This was not really a chorus of my peers. Most were there for a perceived easy grade -- or at least an easy-to-live-through hour -- and participated in lackluster manner. This made the handful of us who were there for the music stand out. In the spring, I tried out for the Choralairs, along with my neighbor. I made it; she didn't.

Senior year was going to be great.

(Now is probably a good time to point out that I don't have the voice I wish I did. I have pretty much the same vocal skills as Madonna: I can carry a tune without embarrassing myself. However, my whole life I've longed for the skills of k.d. lang, which is something else entirely.)

I was dealt two blows upon my return to school in the fall of my senior year. Somebody had fouled up my schedule and placed me in general chorus. Worse, our beloved chorus director, Mr. W, was now an administrator, and we had a new, far-from-warm-and-fuzzy director: Mrs. M, a woman who took every chance she got to remind us that we'd better not make her raise her classically-trained voice.

Somehow I managed to convince people that I did, indeed, belong in the Choralairs, and I got my schedule fixed. (I think Mr. W vouched for me.) But there was no fixing the fact that we were stuck with Mrs. M.

As an adult, I can look back and see that this was probably not her dream job and that she was doing it because she needed the income. She was probably also cowed by the fact that the love that everyone felt for Mr. W hung over the room like her personal black cloud.

She was always grouchy.

She never tired of telling us how superior her 9th grade chorus was to us, and again, as an adult I can see that it was probably insecurity on her part: the 9th grade chorus was untainted by the memories of How Good It Used to Be Under Mr. W.

Worst of all, she also ended the era of the burnt-orange suit-dresses. We performed in chorus robes. I never got the chance to carry the mark of being a Choralaire as I walked through the halls of EHS. I looked just like everyone else, even on concert days.

Except that, for the record, I was ultimately invisible.

On the day the Choralairs had its yearbook photo taken, I skipped school and went to Philadelphia. It wasn't my idea. My then-boyfriend and future ex-husband wanted to go. I really didn't want to; I wanted to be in the yearbook photo, and I think this is precisely why he thought this was the day to make the road trip. If I really loved him, I would go, etc. (Only much later did I realize how hard he tried to make me less successful and how much I bought into it. This is a story unto itself.) Several more candid yearbook photos of the Choralairs in concert also managed to crop me out. Almost 40 years later, I still haven't quite gotten over this.

Still, I was in the Choralairs, and despite Mrs. M and my invisibility problem, it was a great experience. By spring, she had mellowed somewhat. Perhaps she didn't feel as insecure as she had when she first arrived.

For each of us who celebrates Christmas (and this is surely true of any major holiday), there's an element of it without which the holiday just isn't right. For me, more than anything, it's the music. I hope that you all get plenty of whatever "it" is for you.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.

Countdown to Christmas: Snow!

The first in a series of Christmas music videos, because nothing symbolizes Christmas more for me than music, the way music used to be done.



(Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Danny Kaye, and Vera-Ellen.)

Happy Holidays!

I'm off to California to meet my youngest grandson. Have a splendid holiday season!

Merry Christmas from the Afterlife

A few months ago, my almost-13-year-old grandson told me his great-grandmother (mother's mother's mother) had recently died. At least, that's what I thought he told me. I'm not on unfriendly terms with his mother (who is not my son's wife), but we don't chat regularly, either, so I hadn't heard this news.

I confirmed this info to be true with Marine Son, First Grandson's father.

I'd meant to send belated condolence letters/cards to FG's mother and her mother -- dead grandmother was a nice lady and I'd liked her -- but I hadn't got around to it.

Imagine, though, my surprise this week when I received a Christmas card from said dead grandmother.

The stick-on return address label showed just her husband's name, but I immediately recognized the handwriting that had penned my name and address as the same hand I'd been seeing for the 12 years the couple had been sending me cards. My initial reaction was that the great-grandfather had been writing out the Christmas cards all these years and I just hadn't known it until now.

Then I opened the card and found it signed Him and Her.

Signed Him, the widower. Signed Her, the deceased.

I decided that I must have not been paying close attention when First Grandson and Marine Son both told me about the death. I thought it must have been First Grandson's grandfather's mother.

I was, gotta say, freaked out, but also embarrassed that I'd made such a mistake. And I was oh so grateful that I hadn't sent the condolence cards.

However, tonight I decided to double-check. Marine Son is away from home doing training and I certainly wasn't going to call First Grandson or his mom. So I went to the net, plugged in the appropriate info, and...

discovered that the kind lady who sent me the Christmas card did indeed die in July.

Either it really is the husband who's been writing out the cards all these years and he simply can't let go of her, or she was one of those hyper-organized types who wrote them out well in advance and her husband decided to mail them anyway.

In any event, I feel deeply uncomfortable about this.

But I put the card out with the others anyway.

Merry Christmas, Him and Her.

The bitter with the sweet

Christmas was a gentle day; even Tall Son, whose girlfriend recently broke his heart, seemed to find the day pleasant, even if he would rather have spent it with the woman who has sent him away. Far-Away Daughter -- still far away -- and her family were ill on Christmas Eve, but recovered by the big day, and she and her husband, Semi-Doc, had an exciting time with the kiddies and her inlaws. Marine Son and his wife, Indian Princess, drove down just for the day. We ate until it hurt, we opened gifts (a stunned Bitty received a new computer via gift cards and an IOU; we picked it up yesterday), and then overwhelmed me napped. While I was sleeping, Marine Son picked up his boy, First Grandson, and later in the day the three of them drove home. First Grandson is spending the week with his father and stepmother. A good time was had by all.

Before Marine Son and family went home, we called Grammie. Uncle G answered the phone. When I said I was glad he was still there so I'd get a chance to talk to him, he said softly, "Oh yes, we're all still here. We can't leave her alone any more." When I talked to Grammie she sounded weary (as she had the last time we'd spoken, on the 23rd), but she sounded cheerful. She catalogued all the people who had called her -- quite a long list since my mother alone has 10 children -- and when she was finished, she catalogued them at least two more times. Then I talked to Uncle D, who promised to call me privately later to tell me what was really going on.

My mother called me yesterday. Uncle D called her and asked her to pass the message on. Grammie must go to a nursing home. She has reached a point -- details not necessary -- that she needs someone nearby at all times, 24 hours a day. Uncle D and his saint of a wife, A, wanted to take her to their home, but she refused. So sometime -- very soon -- she will leave her home for good and pass into the care of strangers. I hope they will be kind strangers. Although there are so many nursing home nightmare stories, I've also heard that if relatives are involved, the patients get good care. My uncles will probably be there daily...and none of us expect her stay to be very long.

Death brings people together in all sorts of interesting ways. Because of Grammie's cancer, Marine Son and I went to see her in October, and in doing so, I reconnected with my uncles and Aunt P, and I met Uncle D's wife. I never got around to writing about that. Maybe I will someday; maybe what I'm saying now is all I need to say about it. Although I sent Christmas cards to them over the years, and when Grammie would be visiting any of us, she'd call the others and make us talk to one another (an awkward situation since we didn't know each other well enough to do much more than discuss the weather), I hadn't seen my uncles and Aunt P since I was a teenager. That was a very long time ago. So Grammie's illness has reconnected me with these relatives and made me a member of the family again.

I've also had long conversations with people whose loved ones have died like Grammie, not suddenly but due to lingering illness, and their stories are remarkably the same. One friend described it as the reverse of birth: the dying person acts much like the newborn, sleeping all the time, unable to converse coherently, dependent on others for food and basic hygiene.

I haven't called Grammie yet. I'm afraid I can't without crying. But I must before the end of the day.

This is life, though: great joy and love alongside deep sorrow. The secret of life, I suppose, is learning to deal with that juxtaposition.