OT Advent Calendar Day 11: Christmas Time Is Here, Charlie Brown
Advent has always been my favorite time of year. Not only does it lead up to the festival of Christmas, but my birthday falls right around half way through. What’s more, I grew up in snowy Central New York—that’s the barren hinterlands of Upstate, for those in the city so nice they named it twice—and if I didn’t get a White Christmas, the Great Lakes were good for a storm around my birthday so there’d at least be a good beginning to the winter.
Advent is far from an untouched subject around these parts, so I’m clearly not alone.
Your OT Advent Calendar this year will be musical. We’ll talk about diamond-in-the-rough traditional tunes just waiting for renewed popularity, crimes against Christmas, the silly songs and the songs that have become modern traditions. We’ll also talk about the notion of true Christmas Carols, those which address the twelve days festival beginning on Christmas itself, including not just the one day-counting song but another.
Let’s dive in, shall we?
Today’s tune is “Christmas Time Is Here.”
I have a confession to make.
I . . . don’t like Peanuts. Now, before Mr. Donaldson — tolerant, forgiving, brilliant and above all handsome Mr. Donaldson — gets to my office I will lay out my defense, meagre and inadequate as it is.
Friends, readers, Ordinarians: lend me your ears. The bad takes that men have live after them; the good are oft interred with their bones. So let it be re: Peanuts. I know I am known to some as Linus. To this I say, he’s not the one with the piano, right? Look, when it came to Sunday funnies I gravitated to Hägar the Horrible and the Far Side. But Andrew will say I have bad takes, and Andrew is an honorable man.
God forbid I spend my eternal rest in Hell, the Peanuts theme will be on repeat, I have little doubt. That said, a blind squirrel still finds a nut twice a day—or something to that effect—and so perhaps this song may be the Christmas diamond-in-the-rough I’ve been missing all my life.
The research began, and it turns out this is a different song:
Dang, it’s Christmas Time Is Here. So close.
And so I present you with my stream of, uh, whatever it is my brain does response to what many, many people of good taste and take say is a Christmas Classic, including one Andrew Donaldson, and to be sure, Andrew is an honorable man.
Oooh, we’re not off to a great start. It begins with the sort of jazzy Major 7th chords that are the essence of a mind state I have called since childhood “Yellow,” which consists of equal parts boredom, emptiness and despair. I’ll own that this is on me, so I’ll soldier on.
The lyrics so far—the first smoky jazz club verse—fit the melody hand-in-glove, if the hand had three fingers and two thumbs and the glove was one of those creepy shoes with five individual toes.
The more I listen, I realize it’s all in that elevated-just-above-elevator jazz I can’t stand. Again, that’s on me. De gustibus, and all that. But I’m reminded, for the second day in a row, of effects heroin had on jazz, and while the closest I’ve come to either was my membership as guitar in the Jazz Combo at my High School—where my finest moment was the time we played warm up at a Bob Dole rally and I convinced the singer to change “Soul Man” in “Dole Man”—this song too closely resembles Santa hanging out with the Lotos-Eaters from the Odyssey for my taste.
I will say this in its favor, however: Tomorrow was going to be “Santa Baby,” but I’m in no mood to deal with the visuals of Mrs. Clause on a stripper pole. I’ll find some other modern song . . . Mariah Carey, perhaps?
