I recently popped into a Walgreens on a Saturday night to pick up a couple of travel necessities: hair gel and gummy peaches. “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays” by The Carpenters was playing loud and clear.
Standing there in the hair care aisle looking for a travel size tube of gel, I had a warm, fuzzy moment. I was suddenly in the Christmas spirit, whereas five minutes earlier I was just a guy with a sweet tooth and flat hair.
The feeling didn’t last long. I was back to normal by the time I returned to my hotel room. This isn’t my first trip around the Christmas tree. I know not to get my hopes up.
One reason the holidays are such a struggle for so many is because life rarely delivers what the lyrics in our favorite Christmas songs promise. To hear the songs tell it, the holiday experience consists of a well-sugared yet perfectly behaved family, tuckered out from a quick trip to the local five and dime for some last minute shopping, roasting chestnuts in the glow of a crackling fire, while watching pristine snow fall on a clear, starry night where all is calm, bright, and silent, except for the silver bells.
After singing along for a solid month, this is what we come to expect.
What we get instead are stores packed with deal-hunting zombies, retina-scarring light displays, skyrocketing debt, bratty kids, family “misunderstandings,” and faces twitching and tingling with stressed-out-stressy-stressedness.
That’s why someone decided to tell the truth in “The Twelve Pains of Christmas,” which does a great job of, as the kids like to say, “keepin’ it real.”
Why do we return every December to a genre of music that sets us up for disappointment and depression a month later?
Because every Christmas song contains a kernel of truth just big enough to remind of the best from our past, while describing an ideal future for which we all pine. The world described in holiday music doesn’t exist as a whole. Yet we’ve all managed to snatch enough bits and pieces from this made up world to convince us it’s not a complete fairy tale. The collage of Christmas card moments assembled by the local radio station may be too syrupy to digest in one sitting, but when taken one at a time, it’s easy to see that each moment is based on a true story, or at least on a story that should be true.
- There really is no place like home for the holidays after the first semester away at college.
- Our kids have the power to open a portal to a magical world in which we once comfortably moved.
- Sometimes it snows on Christmas Eve, even in Texas.
- We occasionally catch a glimpse of the Holy One at work in the holiday hustle, bustle, and heartburn and we know that Immanuel is more than a word in a Christmas carol. God really is with us.
Christmas music isn’t describing the world as it is, but as we would like it to be, the way it will be someday.
That’s why I keep singing, even when I’m in Walgreens.
Telling Stories, Asking Questions, Learning Lessons
I cringe whenever “baby it’s cold outside” comes on. I mean, he’s put some kind of sedative in her beverage (“say what’s in this drink!?”) and she is probably underage! (She worries what her mother will think!)
I don’t even think of that as Christmas song!
I guess “technically” speaking, it isn’t, but they play it on *ALL* the Christmas radio stations here. And in the stores between Thanksgiving and December 25. My mom says that back when it was written they didn’t have drugs or rock and roll. Sure, mom, sure…
I love the music and the pretty decorations….I am no more delusional about perfect family gatherings. I am a realist…..bob and I now approach it all as a time to share….funny how life lessons change ones’expectons of many aspects of seasons/people.