Still Loving Christmas Music

You know, if you've been following me, that I'm not religious. Raised Methodist, turned staunchly agnostic. Not atheist, agnostic. I don't buy into much of any theology, finding it more useful for threatening followers than being useful. It's political, paternalistic, and patronizing. Many of the basic ethics from my early education are well rooted, like treating others as you would like to be treated. Basic kindness and helpfulness, in other words. The bit about "needing to know the right words in order to be saved" is total crap as far as I'm concerned. And yes, I met somebody who spent hours trying to convince me he knew the right words and I didn't, so only he would be saved, spoken in that smug way of the unjustifiedly prideful.

However, for a few days of the year, I love listening to carols and other traditional songs. I don't pay that much attention to the religious part, the "virgin Mary"  stuff, but most of the music is beautiful. People were their most inspired when they wrote those. They tried to convey love, hope, and magic, projecting light into a season when the planet was at its darkest and people weren't yet assured that light would return. Now that we know it always does, it's less hope for light than celebration of the season's turn.

I used to sing all the singable Christmas songs. All of them, in school choir, in church choir, listening to the radio. I memorized them, learned the new ones, enjoyed the stories of my father singing "The Messiah" and wished I could have had the same experience, and even went out caroling from house to house with a group of friends.

"Silent Night" still chokes me up the first time each season that I hear it. "Nutcracker", while not singable, has become a Christmas music orgy, returning me to some of my best memories with my young children of a time of Christmas magic, a full theater experience followed by a nighttime toboggan ride for my two-year-old when farm lights lit a wonderland of ice coated branches until everything disappeared in thick fog. The traditional carols take me back to a childhood when Santa was real, love was universal for a couple days, and I still believed in magic.

The old voicebox, unused for years, still is impelled to croak along in the privacy of my car or covered by the noise of my shower, running through my treasured catalogue of music from this season. Hope lives again for a bit, a welcome distraction from the onslaught of news of cascading climate change, racism becoming overt again, gun violence, homelessness. Beauty still survives.