HAVE YOURSELF A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS

I love Christmas music. And thanks to the advent of modern music streaming services, people in my generation are becoming acquainted with the Norman Rockwellian, Christmas album covers from days of old. For instance, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” came on while I was driving to work this week, and with it, a darkly-lit and cartoonish rendering of a young Frank Sinatra. His fedora is kitty-corner on his forehead, and shining wet from the snow. He’s looking back, over his shoulder. God, what a charmer.

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is my favorite Christmas song—particularly Sinatra’s version—but I hadn’t previously seen the original cover art for its album, A Jolly Christmas (1957). And it struck a chord. Pun intended.

Because, charming though he may be, what could the Chairman of the Board—that gorgeous crooner, that rosy-cheeked, gentile boy—ever know about heartbreak in December? Or about much needed muddling through and hearts in need of being made light?

Well, he didn’t. Not really. 

Sinatra didn’t write the song. Neither did Judy Garland, despite having given its debut performance in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)—shiksa though she was.

Ralph Blane wrote it. A red-blooded, Oklahoma-born Jew. Actually, he co-wrote it with songwriting partner, Hugh Martin, who was a Seventh-Day Adventist. But the latter fact is beside the point of my story.

I’d be willing to wager that most of your favorite Christmas songs were written by Jews, too. “White Christmas.” “Silver Bells.”  “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” for heaven’s sake. 

All of them, written by members of the Tribe. 

And that piece of American music trivia was a significant part of my Christmas celebrations, growing up. My mom is Catholic. My dad is Jewish. That makes me Jew-ish. 

For me, holidays have always been a syncretic, blended affair in that they have borrowed from the traditions of both faiths.

For my father, the holidays were, I can only imagine, a strange twist of fate. 

He grew up in postwar Randolph, Massachusetts—a predominantly Jewish town outside of Boston. But the rest of the city and its surrounding suburban malaise is historically Catholic. So when my parents were deciding what to raise us kids, it was out of convenience, more than anything, that we were raised Catholic.

And so, every Christmas, my dad would schlepp his four half-Jewish, blue-eyed children to evening mass in Foxboro, Massachusetts and endure all the kneeling and standing, kneeling and standing, and tireless “smells and bells” (his phrase, not mine), only to come home to the bizarre lamb and mint jelly concoction that his own shiksa wife had put on the table. 

Still, my dad was always the first guy with his finger on the turntable needle around this time of year. Who knows? Maybe I had seen, before, that image of Sinatra on A Jolly Christmas, buried somewhere in the stack of my father’s records along with Tony Bennett, Bing Crosby, and his favorite, Nat King Cole. The man loved holiday music. It was a point of pride for him that, insofar as writing its score, “Jews invented Christmas.” 

Because behind Nat and Frank, after all, were the composers—Ralph Uriah Hunsecker, Robert Levison, Israel Beilin, and Mel Tormé, whom we all know as Ralph Blane, Robert Wells, Irving Berlin, and well, Mel Tormé.

Many of those composers came from immigrant families. Families that moved to America in the mass migration from Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century. And what those immigrants wanted, as historicized by my father, was to be American in the most basic, Wonder Bread kind of way. To assimilate into American culture.

And Christmas, a Christian holiday with a lot of baby-in-the-manger imagery, was a major component of that culture. 

Composer and conductor, Rob Kapilow, explains: “I think one of the things that’s interesting is it’s really a story about pogroms, prejudice, poverty, immigration, assimilation and the powerful creative imaginations of an extraordinary group of songwriters who [were] trying to find their way into an American culture. You know, first of all, lots of roads into American culture were blocked for these Jews, but they wanted to become part of that American world. And so what they did was they looked around, they listened around, and they created the soundtrack of secular Christmas.”

American Jewish songwriters reformed Christmas from what was a religiously exclusive holy day to something of a lay, wintry festival. There was still frankincense and myrrh, sure, but there was snow and roasting chestnuts, too. There were themes of universal longing for home and anticipation of what the year ahead would bring—themes that resonated with Americans in wartime (as many of the Christmas classics were written at the outbreak of WWII), and themes that immigrant Jews knew well. Listen to these songs, and you’ll hear some of the chord progressions of klezmer music. What has become a tree-decorating soundtrack, on one hand, is also beautiful and melancholic on the other.

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This is not the first Christmas season I’ve been away from my home and my family, but it has been the most difficult.

As I get older, I can better understand why this music meant so much to my dad. While we were growing up, we had no Jewish neighbors, no Jewish friends. We lived in a town without a temple. It must have all been somewhat strange. But still, despite celebrating this holiday that was not his own, my dad could be proud of its musical tradition.

Christmas music, then, has taken on the responsibility of cultural inclusion. It provides a means of mutual understanding by way of something wholly wonderful.

And that’s something we need right now. 

There is hatred rife in the world. There is anti-Palestinian hate. There is anti-Semitic hate. And if you read that, and devise some kind of political contradiction to it, I’d ask you to read it again. There is hatred rife in the world, for which there has never, and will never be a rightful political contradiction or justification. Hatred is always intolerable, but that we’re feeling it and seeing it so much right now—at a time that should be about joy, and family, and hope—is defeating.

The way I see it, the Christmas standards are devoted to reconciliation. Reconciliation, in every sense of the word. Reconciling the traditions of the olden days and the golden days, sure. But the bigger picture has always been about a resolution between—and therefore betterment among—a multitude of faiths and cultures. It’s been about finding peace, and all the bullshit that, maybe, bears so much repeating because it has substance.

But that reconciliation might very well be a far time off. So in the meantime, a familiar lyric: “Until then, we’ll have to muddle through, somehow.”

Merry Christmas.