How Mitch Miller and the Gang stole Christmas
I like the season of Advent. With the time change, dusk lies waiting for the end of the work day. The sense that one has time to play with, those disposable hours that beg no accounting, fades. Night is coming. It is time to be at home, where artificial lights reflect off the living room windows and keep night’s sentries at bay. This night, supper may be eaten early, and then a board game or book to focus the mind and prepare the body for slumber.
Having spent only one year out of the last 23 outside an academic calendar, I decelerate through December by default. The stress of finals notwithstanding, most elements of my environment herald the coming respite by slowing their pace on a continuum. With Christmas comes family and traditions and a distinct lack of the need to do anything in particular. Such Advent always was for me, and so my ideal is and will be.
I conceived this reflection as a vehicle for the reasoned expression of my distaste for songs that extoll Christmas as an end in itself. I am well aware that for many these songs are nostalgic of Christmases past when things were simpler and times happier. Ever the sentimentalist, I would never begrudge anyone this. Yet, wanting for sympathy, I am left fending off an anachronistic assault that makes silence a salve. Yes, Brenda Lee, this means you.
Bemoaning the commercialization of Christmas is but one of my gripes that have become cliché. Contrary to the ritardando I remember, Black Friday now turns streets and stores into a congested morass of checklists for an entire month. Driving anywhere is made miserable; braving a retail establishment traumatic. At some point, I am obligated either to contribute to the problem or to meet my friendly and familial obligations online, buying an appropriate gift for each person, based either on what they procured for me last year or will this. In addition, I must provide a list of demands to those upon whom, without which, my friendship or bloodsharing would be intolerably burdensome. Far be that from me.
Amid this plague of self-gratifying fervor, I struggle to escape the songs that immortalize the essence of Christmas. Despite the fact that walking might very well be quicker now than driving, there is no winter wonderland out there through which to stroll, no snow or white Christmas. Nor could there be, without making life in southern California even more insufferable. (Can you even imagine?) All the scenes befitting a Saturday Evening Post cover that these songs describe are the antithesis of life here generally, and what we have made Christmas specifically. How does attaching the spirit of rock to Christmas elevate it? Why are we singing about Santa Claus as an infant or an illicit lover? (?!) Beyond the inanity of the songs themselves, why can’t we see the irony when these songs are being used to promote the materialism that we so often bemoan? Wading through exhausted shoppers is made no less miserable when I’m told that in a city somewhere it is Christmastime and children are laughing and treasure-laden shoppers are snow-crunching and somehow the utter madness of it all is totally lost on every last one of them. If I must boil my irritation down to a simple, bitter reduction sauce, it is that I do not see those who sing or enjoy these songs doing anything to promote or obtain any such joyful state. Rather, they imbue every aspect of the season with worry and demand. We have too much Christmas to enjoy Advent. Instead of waiting hopefully for what was and is and is to come, we obsess over the exaggerated window dressing of a season that is intended to reflect our focus inward but instead scatters our attention toward anything but what truly is.
Meanwhile, behind and beneath the chaotic rush to make it to Christmas with enough virtue left to enjoy it (and money left to buy food in January), Advent begins the church year with a promise of hope and rest and the ultimate realization of human expectation. Prepare the way to your hearts, for the Lord is coming.
I am still getting used to the idea that Christmas carols should be sung during Christmas and not advent; and, while practicing this would make them perhaps as glorious as the Gloria at the Easter vigil, I love these songs too much to exercise this discipline fully.
My favorite Christmas song used to be “O Holy Night,” and it remains the song I enjoy most for its melodic quality. But “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” is simply unmatched in its ability to make me thrill at the story of salvation and sing louder than my talent warrants. If we are going to use Christmas music to harken back to times past, why look any nearer than the Nativity? Songs like “Jingle Bells” and “The Christmas Song” cannot paint half as tranquil or heartwarming a picture as “It Came upon the Midnight Clear.”
As I said, I recognize that these songs have an affective appeal for many, and I hesitate to describe anyone’s emotional preferences in pejorative terms. Indeed, it’s how I justified going to Singspiration on Sunday nights. But rather than give the impression that I dislike certain songs because they’re not about Jesus, I wanted to explore the reasons for my growing disdain toward them. And, having done so, I can only remain convinced that joy of the Incarnation grows only more wondrous with contemplation. Entangling its significance with aught else—especially a longing for what cannot be (and which for most, I suspect, never was)—is to diffuse the Light that has come into the world, the Light in light of Which—like cold-blooded creatures—we live and move and have our being.
Christ is born. Glorify Him!
