After a pizza dinner with Andy and my parents, we returned home when my Mom texted that ‘The Sound of Music’ and the Charlie Brown Christmas Special were about to be broadcast. When everything else feels wrong and worrisome, something like ‘The Sound of Music’ is an escape to a place and time that somehow feels more innocent. How terrifying that the days leading up to World War II were captured in a movie that now feels innocent.

As the Von Trapp family sang with the Nazi world closing in around them, it felt eerily not that far from where the current world may one day be headed. But once again I was reminded that there are good people here, that goodness and love will triumph, and that light will always drive out darkness.

And a song about one little flower can change one little family who could change our little world. 

Browsing in Marshalls Homegoods like an idiot the other day, I heard a song where the main gist was that someone wanted an alien for Christmas. It was actually quite catchy, and I wished it wasn’t about a goddamn alien because aliens just don’t say Christmas to my crazy-ass brain. That said, I’m open enough to consider adoring more unconventional Christmas songs, such as this one titled ‘Champagne Drops’ by a group called My Bubba. It was part of a Scandinavian holiday playlist that someone put together inspired by hygge, and it’s become part of our holiday repertoire. 

Feels like come- way dance me round
Nuts crack under the soles our feet a Christmas sound
Reindeer making out on the couch all day long
Champagne drops on our ear drums pops
From the cork in the big kitchen pantry

Did I do a deep-dive into what these lyrics might mean? Nah. I don’t have time to over-analyze a Christmas treasure when I find one. Just indulge in the sweet holiday lullaby and shut up. It’s goddamn Christmas for Christ’s sake. Show some respect. I mean… fuck. 

Feels like come- way dance me round
Feels like come- way dance me round, round, round

This joins the ranks of the Hawaiian way of saying Merry Christmas or that hippopotamus bullshit – novelty songs that take a hold in your brain and don’t let up until you find a new way of hating on Christmas for all that it’s done to our heads. (By the way, hippos are no fucking joke. Look it up. They’re dangerous.) Maybe this song is more tolerable to me because it hasn’t been force-fed upon my ears for forty-plus years. Give it time. I’ll probably hate it by next year – but not as much as I hate the one about you forgetting the cranberries too. 

Feels like come- way dance me round
Nuts crack under the soles our feet a Christmas sound
Reindeer making out on the couch all day long
Champagne drops on our ear drums pops
From the cork in the big kitchen pantry

Feels like come- way dance me round
Feels like come- way dance me round, round, round.

Christmas memories are often conjured from two of the most powerful memory triggers: scent and sound. This Christmas medley, played simply and elegantly on a piano, contains several songs that may bring to mind memories of your own. 

We didn’t think there would be another holiday season like 2020, but here we are a year later, and in even more uncertainty. Christmas used to be the time when we could, however briefly, return to some of the innocence and wonder of childhood. That feels like a very long time ago, and now I wonder whether we’ve passed that point, whether that will ever again be possible. In some serious and substantial ways, I’m fairly certain we won’t be going back there, and there’s something incredibly mournful about that. 

And yet… and yet…

Christmas is nothing if not the time for a last-minute chance for redemption, that eleventh-hour Ebenezer Scrooge twist of fate that allows the year, however tumultuous, to quietly start over again. I haven’t quite given up completely. And that’s enough for now. 

When Suzie and I were growing up, the best way to express the inner-demons and angels of the heart was through the exchange of a mix tape. It was the safest mechanism for prickly teens who wanted to share their struggle as much as they wanted it kept completely secret. During our junior year of high school, Suzie was studying abroad in Denmark, while I was stuck in Amsterdam, New York, trying to get through the holidays without her for the first time, and mostly making a muck of it, lost and angry amid the trials and travails of a teenager without his best friend/sister figure. And so I would whisper dramatic readings and diary-like entries into a recorder, filling the first and second sides of a 90-minute cassette tape. For my Christmas mix, I included the usual seasonal fare, ‘Diamonds & Pearls’ by Prince and ‘Promise to Try’ by Madonna, and this classical staple, ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ by Bach. 

There was something moving and peaceful in its melody and cadence, and it calmed the riots going on in my head and heart, when I was on the veritable verge of self-destruction, lost and lonely and finding no solace even at this tender time of the year when it was supposed to be so safe and joyous and happy. I played this song over and over again in the middle of the night, allowing it to lead me to deeper stages of sadness and despondency, to a place where I saw no way out, no path forward. It’s why Christmas, to this very day, comes tinged with a sense of somber solemnity. 

Looking back, all the drama and secrecy and urgency of that Christmas without Suzie seems silly and overblown. We can laugh at it a little bit now. But there was sadness there as well, a sadness that lived for all the loneliness and loss we had each experienced, Suzie much more-so than me. We honor that in this song.