Christmas Songs and the Atheist

Knowing I am an atheist, a dear friend sent me a delightful little 2010 piece from Alternet, "10 Best Christmas Songs for Atheists," by Greta Christina. Her criteria for songs to make it onto the list are that the songs must not be parodies; must make no mention of God, Jesus, angels, saints, or miracles; be reasonably well-known; be good songs.

These are good criteria, but were I to adopt them, they would require me to relinquish my beloved "The Holly and the Ivy," "Coventry Carol" and "Lo, How a Rose." 

I love the Christmas story. It's a great (if implausible) story, and I would like to see more of it in Christmas. When I was very young, I would open our King James to Luke: "Mary kept these things and pondered them in her heart." I would set the open Bible on the white bedsheet skirt under the tree. I think it was the word "pondered" that got to me.

I couldn't have described the transcendent "Carol of the Bells" better than Christina: "...stunning.... ...lavishly, thrillingly beautiful. ...eerie and festive [qualities] ...so central to ...great Christmas music... ...old -- original Ukrainian folk tune ...may even be prehistoric -- and it sounds it. In the best possible way. ...richly evocative of ancient mysteries...."

I'm not a big fan of most of the songs she chooses for the top ten, though that is not necessarily the songs' fault. Rather, when I moved to San Antonio in 2002, and was struggling to find a job, I did seasonal work at Macy's from early-November through mid-January. I did it again, when a temporary gig came to an end, in 2005. (In 2002, they paid $7.00/hour; in 2005, $6.00.)

Over the holidays, department stores play continuous loops of Christmas songs adapted by the pop stars du jour. "Sleigh Ride," "Let It Snow," "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," "Jingle Bells," "Winter Wonderland" and my most loathed "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year" are top picks for this Chinese water torture. I sometimes think I could die happy if I never heard them again. 

I was glad to see "Deck the Halls" on the list, but how could "O Tannenbaum" not make it into the top ten?

The only "White Christmas" I really like, and for that matter the only "I'll Be Home for Christmas," are Bing's, and though I like "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire," I prefer that it be sung by Nat King Cole. I'll even allow for "Silver Bells" if Perry Como is doing the crooning.

I consider "Go Tell It on the Mountain" a Christmas song and get out Simon and Garfunkel's Wednesday Morning, 3 AM every Christmas season.

No, atheist or not, these criteria would deprive me of too much. The soaring chorales of "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," the "Angels from the Realms of Glory" as well as those "Angels We Have Heard on High," "O Come All Ye Faithful" and "Joy to the World!" The good news of "I Saw Three Ships," "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" and "Bring a Torch, Jeanette Isabella." I have a special fondness for Christmas songs in minor keys: "I Wonder as I Wander," "We Three Kings," "What Child Is This?" and the round-like "Ding Dong Merrily on High." 

The darker subtext of the deceptive cheer of "Here We Come A-wassailing" and "Good King Wenceslas" gives the lie to once-a-year charity. 

And we haven't even started on the great religious oratori of Handel, Bach, et al., early Christmas music, and traditional songs from other countries. Such a bounty of music!

Handwritten Letters

Last month the New York Times published a little essay in the Opinionator column by Jim Sollisch called "The Art of Repitition" about writing thank you notes. That prompted me to think about my own beginnings as a writer.

Like Sollisch, my earliest writing outside of school was in the form of thank-you letters. Growing up in my household, it would have been unimaginable to have received a gift or a special invitation and not to have reciprocated with a written thank-you. Simply writing "Thank you for the gift" was not sufficient. The letter had to be specific, and I learned early on to include some description of how and when the gift would be of use/delight/instruction to me.

My first "professional" writing was a charge I was given each summer. My grandparents had 80 acres in Toano, a tiny farming community outside of Williamsburg, Virginia. My family lived in Ardmore,Oklahoma, where my father was a geologist, and each summer, when school let out, my mother, sister and I would board a Boeing 707 (we may have even taken flights on the older De Havilland Comet) to my grandparents. In August, my father would make the drive east for his two-week vacation and then drive the family back to Oklahoma.

In a town the size of Toano, the arrival each year of Mr. and Mrs. Chas. W. Richards' daughter, Mary Jane, and her two daughters was news, news that had to be announced in Toano's weekly newspaper. Almost as soon as I could string sentences together on a piece of paper, I was given the assignment each June of writing the article for the paper -- in second-person objective, formal prose. Like Sollisch, I learned early on "the practice of saying the same thing over and over again in different ways."

For as long as I can remember, I was expected to write to my grandmother weekly, though those letters were mostly about daily comings and goings. My correspondence with my grandfather, who was a great moralist and story teller, was altogether different, and we carried on a wonderful conversation in letters until he died in 1971.

Anyone who had a father in the oil business in the late '50s and '60s knew to expect him to be transferred (that was the term). We were fairly lucky and weren't transferred as often as some of my friends' families. We did a stint in '60 and '61 in Richardson, Texas, outside of Dallas. When we moved back to Ardmore, I began an exchange of letters with the one friend I had made in Richardson, and when my father was transferred to Tulsa in 1969, one of my girlfriends back home and I wrote lengthy letters back and forth. While I was in graduate school, a best friend from Oklahoma College of Liberal Arts was living in rural Oklahoma in a trailer that burned to the ground. A couple of years later she told me that the only thing she wished she could have saved from the fire were my letters. That statement moved me deeply.

Though I would eventually be satisfied with three or four pages from a yellow pad, my side of these early correspondences was conducted on Eaton's deckle edge stationery. Out of curiosity, I just now opened the Eaton Cards and Stationery webpage to see if it is still available. The tabs across the top of the Home page read Weddings, Births, Funerals, How to Order, and Contact. There is no tab for Correspondence or Stationery. The handwritten note has been relegated exclusively to rites of passage. Along with newspapers, magazines, and books, the digital age is making stationery and the handwritten letter into artifacts.

I have never stopped writing letters of condolence on fine writing paper by hand. The first time I thanked someone for a gift in an email, I apologized profusely. Now I don't, and that is cause for mourning.