© Celine Sparks, 2023
Met my old lover in the grocery store. Who writes a song about that? Apparently, Dan Fogelberg. The plot thickens as the woman spills her purse, and they can’t find anywhere open, so they sit and talk in the car. I’m always like, “Hello-oh? You’ve got groceries in the trunk! Somebody better get home and get that gallon of milk in the fridge!”
I really don’t think the song would have stood a chance except for one tiny factor. I mean, the idea just never really got off the ground, did it? This was like the toy I saw once at Dollar Tree that had 3 balls, a milk bottle, and a hammer. I turned it over in my hands several times thinking but one thought: Someone was smoking some bad juju at the toy manufacturer’s meeting.
Dan Fogelberg apparently got the same batch. But here’s the tiny factor. Here’s what sold the song. It mentioned that snow was falling. Ding! That hailed it forever as a Christmas song just as surely as if it had been the Ray Coniff Singers belting out twelve days of utterly ridiculous gifts.
That’s all it takes to have longevity if you’re a song – get classified in the Christmas rotation. And to do that, the lyrics just have to mention snow (or at least a cool draft), an angel, the word hallelujah, or some wrapping paper, even if it’s brown.
Don’t pigeonhole me in the wrong hole, though. Don’t dismiss me as a cynic who doesn’t like Christmas music. That would be wronger than taking I-65 to get to New Guinea. Or Old Guinea. Yeah, don’t pigeonhole me that way because pigeons don’t even hole up with guineas. They do fine eating French fries and pooping in parking decks.
I happen to love Christmas music to an inordinately unhealthy degree. I play it the 24th and 25th of every month as kind of a memorial to the hot chocolate, fuzzy socks days of December. I also play it if it snows, or I see someone with a white beard, or a picture of a deer in a sporting goods store. So I’m at least what you would call moderately a fan.
But there are just some really bad songs that don’t make the cut for me. I like the old crooners dreaming of white snow scenes and silver bells in a voice so mellow it can melt the almond bark off the pretzel clumps.
Some songs just don’t count, you know? “Grandma got run over by a reindeer” doesn’t count. It doesn’t. Christmas songs should lift our spirits, conjure memories of cinnamon sticks, eggnog, and blue tins labeled Royal Dansk, filled with bland cookies in pleated paper cups. It’s the holidays, for Pete’s sake! Throw the calorie counter in the yule log and have some fun! Grandma dying in a clumsy reindeer encounter doesn’t fit the “fun” criteria for me. It leans more toward, say, clinical depression.
Songs also don’t count where the lyrics are incoherent. This is the case with Celebrate Me Home. What does that even mean? Stuck in traffic? Missed the three o’clock bus, I gotta get home. Somebody celebrate me; hurry! It even says, “Give me a number, please.”
I’m so confused. How does this work? Is this like the DMV?
I can’t even really get a handel on the Hallelujah chorus. But I’m pretty sure what happened is the music teacher, probably at the Berlin Middle School, required a word minimum in the composition assignment, and Frideric didn't even realize it was due until 7:45 right before homeroom. So he stuck the word “hallelujah" in there 114 times. My friend Trellis did that with the word “very” in the seventh grade, even changing it to “extremely” half the time, which was at least more than Frideric did.
I’m not sure his work gets a pass as a Christmas song for me, but it gets air time. For me, I need bells jingling, some fire crackling, holly, jolly, a dolly, and unintelligent snowmen mistaken for parsons.
That’s festive. That gives a spring in the step and a yearning for pine-scented traditions and favorite family moments. That’s the criteria. That’s the sound of Christmas.
Hallelujah!
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