Noel

Most people have a favorite holiday song or Christmas carol, maybe two or three. My answer to the question of which is my favorite changes every few years depending on the memories associated with it. This year, I’m joining in a blog chain talking about favorite holiday music. Harriet and Hugh have already written their posts, so I’m joining in as the first writer in the chain for whom music is less of a professional interest and more of an avocation. Both of them talked about memories, although Hugh surprised me by discussing a secular song.

Harriet at spynotes
Hugh at Permanent qui vive
Jeanne at Necromancy never pays
Cranky at It’s My Blog!
Dr. Geek at Dr. Geek’s Laboratory
Lemming at Lemming’s Progress
Readersguide at Reader’s Guide to…
Freshhell at Life in Scribbletown
edj3 at kitties kitties kitties
My Kids’ Mom at Pook and Bug
joyhowie at The Crooked Line
Magpie at Magpie Musing
Dave at The Ideal Dave
and back to Harriet at spynotes

Memories build up on holiday songs each time we hear one, and, for me, each new memory adds to the sentimental attachment. In the past few years, though, trouble with auditory discrimination—being able to filter out what one wants to hear from background noise—is making me grinchy about holiday music. I just went to a holiday lunch party where I sat across the table from a soft-spoken person near the speakers that were playing music, and the conversation suffered from the fact that I couldn’t ask him to repeat every single sentence that came out of his mouth. So I guessed. Not being able to hear is irritating; my own family members get impatient when I ask them to repeat what they’ve said or turn up the volume on the TV, and people in public places have even less patience. So lately I tend to prefer a song with a story or a carol that has something unusual about it, as in this poem by Anne Porter:

Noel

When snow is shaken
From the balsam trees
And they’re cut down
And brought into our houses

When clustered sparks
Of many-colored fire
Appear at night
In ordinary windows

We hear and sing
The customary carols

They bring us ragged miracles
And hay and candles
And flowering weeds of poetry
That are loved all the more
Because they are so common

But there are carols
That carry phrases
Of the haunting music
Of the other world
A music wild and dangerous
As a prophet’s message

Or the fresh truth of children
Who though they come to us
From our own bodies
Are altogether new
With their small limbs
And birdlike voices

They look at us
With their clear eyes
And ask the piercing questions
God alone can answer.

The “haunting” carols and the ones that tell a story are easier to hear because they’re not just background; for anyone, they take some real listening.

My current favorite of the songs that tell a story is one with accumulated meaning in my family over the past few years.  Every time I hear it, I smile; it’s Baby, It’s Cold Outside. The first time I noticed it was in the movie Elf; I thought the scene where Buddy started to join in when Jovie was singing it was fun, and it made me listen to the words. Then my kids started singing it together, back when Walker was so young he was singing the higher “mouse” part, and they began calling it “the date rape song.” They played around with switching the “mouse” and “wolf” parts for a couple of years until they became so known for it among their friends that their “Princess Tutu Abridged” group asked them to sing it for the holiday special. (Here is that version; they had some trouble hearing each other and the background music towards the end, but you can hear them having fun with it.)  The other version we think is wonderful is the one where two guys who are in love with each other sing it together on Glee. This year Walker sang the wolf part at the public library as part of the local “Christmas walk” with his girlfriend as the mouse; the song continues to go through permutations and collect new associations.

Hearing the lush harmonies of Baby, It’s Cold Outside gives me a smaller, more personal kind of satisfaction than something like the thrill of hearing a full choir singing the triumphant ending of Handel’s Messiah. As Mark Doty describes some of his experience of listening to a local performance:

Aren’t we enlarged
by the scale of what we’re able
to desire? Everything,
the choir insists,

might flame;
inside these wrappings
burns another, brighter life,
quickened, now,

by song: hear how
it cascades, in overlapping,
lapidary waves of praise? Still time.
Still time to change.

This year, what seems most important to me in the process of discovering a favorite is the performance of it, the time when people are listening most attentively. The associations–another year, another performance–are continually laid over the previous ones, making a patina that enhances this year’s performance; something has always changed since the last time, whether we meant it to or not.

More years, more meaning. What is your current favorite holiday song?