Not Really a POETS Day: Caroling! Caroling!

Girls choir singing Christmas carols, Brisbane, 2021 – Photo by Kgbo

Institutions grow sclerotic with age. That’s what they tell you. I think they get wily. The Catholic Church has been around for two thousand years and over its millennia as a body of instruction has found that if teachers don’t let the kids know what order the classes are scheduled to take the stage for their Christmas Pageant song until the morning of, all the parents have to be there when whatever grade sings the opener.

When my oldest was still at the school, we had a terrible run of late pageant appearances. When he was in kindergarten they went next to last (the graduating eight grade always gets last) and then through fourth grade his class ended up near the end. If your kid goes first, skipping out early might be worth a teacher’s practiced scowl (or worse; a priest’s raised eyebrow) on the way out but when there are only two or three grades left risk/reward considerations get rekejiggered.

In sixth or seventh grade his class did eventually go first, but by that time his brother was either a kindergartener or in first and picking up late shifts. I’ve only missed the end once; I was sick and watched from the vestibule like a Hansen’s Diseaser. I left right after mine were done; first chance I got.

The songs don’t change year to year. They do “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and “Ave Maria” but those are the only two I’d expect any outsider to recognize. I know the whole catalogue by this point and have developed a soft spot for “Moses, Set Them Free” which the first grade blew out of the church this year. It wasn’t up to the 2015 fifth grade cover, but c’mon.

I wonder if dioceses pass these lesser-known songs around. I’m certain there are scads of rated G public domain songbooks out there, but there’s a mid-seventies beaming folksiness in the face of malaise quality to the Catholic selections. I suspect they’re written by guitar nuns. We had one of those at St. Rose, where I went to grade school. She wrote a Christmas play, which wasn’t exactly a musical but had a few songs, called Eric’s Dream, about a kid that had a dream and I got to play him. That doesn’t impress high-school girls.

I used to think making up alternate lyrics to Christmas carols was a Catholic thing. At St. Rose we hijacked the music for “Jingle Bells” and shouted,

Jingle bells,
Batman smells,
Robin laid an egg.
Batmobile
Lost its wheel
And Penguin got away.

Except when we did it there was an exclamation point leaping off the end of every line.

I really thought that was of the Roman tradition. Now I know it’s long been a staple of inter-sect elementary samizdat, but it seemed like a secret; our little in joke you were taught at the convent like the “Our Father” and “Hail Mary.” None of my public-school friends knew it until I sang it for them so I figured it had something to do with not going to confession or because their parents were divorced.

Kids from other schools in the diocese knew it, albeit with heretical variations. At St. Francis they substituted The Joker for The Penguin in the last line. That made no sense. It’s a Christmas Carol. Christmas happens in winter. Penguins. You don’t have clowns in the winter. The circus comes in the summer.

The kids from Our Lady of Sorrows sang “And Riddler got away.” That’s sad. He was the lamest of Batman’s enemies. We were too young to know about Adam West and Frank Gershin getting kicked out of an orgy for refusing to take off their, respectively, Batman and Riddler costumes, but look at what became of the Riddler character. They cast Jim Carrey in the role. Younger people may have a hard time believing that Carrey was once pretty funny, but yikes, look at him now.

My nephew goes to a larger school. Theirs was a more formal holiday program in a functional theater. It was pretty impressive, at least the parts I stayed for. Their municipality has one event where the elementary band opens, then the middle school, and finally the high school. They play the well-known stuff; scented candle and spice shop background carols but with a certain je ne sais still learning.

The elementary students were appropriately enthusiastic, hit sticks together, and elicited sounds from hand me down violins and such. I was there for the middle school. My nephew is old enough to look uncomfortable in the “ugly Christmas sweater” band uniform he was so excited about last year but managed to pull off a jazzy cool with his trombone protruding from under his hair swoop. As a patron of the kids-related-to-me arts, let me tell you that he’s got a much greater command of the material this season. I could see the work he put into it.

There was a dramatic aspect to the middle school presentation. A few students, of whom I assume the music teacher says “are making great progress,” did a little skit with silly string and Punch and Judy choreography to go along with the band’s playing. After the show there was a lot of applause and bowing followed by expectations. The high school band roster had a variety of asterisks combinations by the names of a lot of players. These indicated an affiliation with local colleges. One star might mean the musician was invited to practice with The University of Alabama Birmingham band, two meant Samford, three Montevallo, etc. They were an accomplished group but lacked nephews. I left before they started.

The hardest part about listening to Christmas music is, for me, keeping my grade school nurtured Weird Al quiet long enough for me to enjoy the carol as the carol.

I mentioned the “Jingle Bells” masterwork above. Anyone who’s ever seen South Park’s Eric Cartman singing “Oh Holy Night” accepts that a straight appreciation of that song is probably forever out of reach. In it, the lines,

A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

are changed to,

Jesus was born and so we get some presents,
Thank you Jesus for be-ee-ee-ing born.

Or something like that. Cartman can be hard to understand. But that’s the song playing in my head when the real one plays.

I remember a local commercial where the lyrics to “Good King Wenceslaus” were rewritten to sell shoes or sofas. I don’t remember exactly. I was ten or eleven and I’m sure I misheard it because my takeaway from the new and improved “Wenceslaus” was that the fifth line where the choir gets a bit livelier and was originally sung as,

Brightly shone the moon that night,
tho’ the frost was cruel,

Somehow became – and again I’m sure I misheard but the point is this is what stuck with me –

Christ has better holidays,
Ha -ha, ha-ha, ha, ha!

I wanted to have a POETS Day examination of Christmas lyrics, but since I’ve allowed too many traditional Christmas songs to pick up a lyrical overlay I went looking for ones I hadn’t heard. I found that someone wrote a carol to a Christina Rossetti poem, “Love Came Down at Christmas,” from The Goblin Market and Other Poems. Unfortunately, it’s terrible. There’s a video of The Monmouth Choral Society trying to stay awake while singing it and a few succeed. Another audio version I heard reminds me of a great bit Eddie Izzard does in his stand up about stiff upper class types singing Church of England hymns and being performatively solemn or exuberant but unsure when it’s proper to be either.

I’m always good with “Ode to Joy” and though I still reel off goofy lines in my head, Manheim Steamroller’s Christmas album came out right when my dad discovered Nakamichi and Polk Audio so it got a lot of play; sentimental favorite. Wham’s “Last Christmas” is a great song that is set at Christmastime. That makes it a Christmas song in the same way that Die Hard being a great movie set at Christmastime makes it a Christmas movie. You may have just witnessed the first comparison of Wham to Die Hard. Mazel tov, if true.

My wife played “Gabriel’s Message” for me this evening and it’s fantastic. I’d never heard it before, but it’s an old Basque carol taking its lyrics from “The Magnificat” and other parts of Luke. I’m a Basque fan. I love lamb, Boise, and hake simmered in white wine. How did I miss this? The version she played was recorded by Sting in 1985. I listen to The Police all the time, still think he killed the guy in Only Murders in the Building, and have read the Alan Moore Swamp Thing books at least one and a half times. Still missed it. It’s here if you like and worth your time.

I have a favorite Christmas song. I’m setting myself up for guff here, but I’m a big fan of Sir Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime.” People roll their eyes, but that’s learned behavior. Everybody secretly likes it. I play it for the “BONG-BONg-BOng-Bong-bong.” The video is fantastic.

I want a pub Christmas with scarves. The galactic keyboard and glowing horses are a little odd, but he’s got “I was a Beatle” credit to spend, so why not. What’s so endearing about the video is how awkward, stiff, and out of place Linda looks. She doesn’t fit in, but she’s with Paul. It’s sweet.

Diana Ross released a version of the song in 1994 and it’s good because she can’t sing a bad song, but overdressed. Instead of the “BONG-BONg…” her version has subdued strings plucking and it’s labored. In the original your brain accepts an impossible echo as the synthesizers strike a note and fade. I see Ross’s violinists successively using lighter touches in decreasing windows of time, and though that’s analogue real deal stuff the synthesizers seem more genuine and less frantic. Oddly, after avoiding them for most of the song, she finishes with synthesizers and a fairy tale castle trumpet fanfare that doesn’t work. It’s like she was back in The Wiz.

Ross’s feels like the product of studio pros presenting a made for tv extravaganza. Even the embarrassing “ding dong” middle from the original is polished in hers. It shouldn’t be. There’s a part of every family’s Christmas tradition that is cringeworthy if shown to others and as goofy as the McCarthy song can be, it captures a relaxed, no airs, I’m at home and doing what I want to with my glow horse, pub simplicity. No amount of whining from the assembled will make me change to another Christmas song when it comes on.

Maybe Linda does fit in. My kids aren’t particularly musical but they’ve been up on the altar singing at St. Francis in some combination for twelve years. My son’s class looked a mess this time. They’re allowed variations within the uniform so some wore blue sweaters or sweatshirts while the others wore white shirtsleeves. Nobody’s tie was straight. My own’s was 80’s detective loose. One poor kid’s parents made him wear a blazer with the school crest.

It just happened that all the blues were standing to the left and all the white shirtsleeves to the right. From a distance, it looked deliberate and stylish. Up close, they looked like recently corralled Dickens characters. Some were dedicated to the mission of letting the world know that the little star in the song was burning bright and doing so with a cheerleader’s best Vaseline smile. Others were busy trying to find their parents in the audience. They were having a wonderful Christmas time. I only get three more of these.

Merry Christmas.

“BONG-BONg-BOng-Bong-bong”