Every year it’s a different carol that catches me and hauls me in. The first Christmas song always steals into town right after Thanksgiving, like the first gentle plink that signals a cloudburst, and within days the deluge is inescapable: the office elevators and the street corners and the stores awash in holiday music. From a first unwelcome reminder of just how fast Christmas is coming, the ceaseless tintinnabulation of those anthems quickly turns unbearable.
I’ve never known a world without recorded Christmas carols. While I was young my sisters and I would dig out once a year our scratchy discs of Joan Baez trilling away at “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and Burl Ives growling out ” The Friendly Beasts” and Peter, Paul, and Mary harmonizing a song whose title I can’t remember, but it was about a shivering little boy who offers to share his only piece of bread with a gray-haired lady on Christmas Eve, and we would sob as we played it over and over on the Magnavox in the basement.
But nowadays, as I grow old, it feels as though there are just too many recordings playing far too much. Ever since Enrico Caruso was first pressed on a one-sided 78, nearly every performer in America has felt compelled to issue a Christmas album, and the sheer bulk of that music has added up to more than anyone could listen to in a thousand holidays.
The big three of the season — Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole — remain perennial best-sellers, while Elvis Presley’s holiday collections and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir still hold their own. But the discount Christmas-record bins tumble together Mantovani with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Tony Bennett with the Vienna Boys Choir, “Paul Revere and the Raiders Sing the Season” with “The Amazing Zamfir Plays Carols on his Pan Pipes,” and Christmas anthologies from Muzak, Motown, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Grand Ole Opry.
Most of the traditional carols are sturdy enough to stand up to almost anything the Yuletide pits against them: Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass, a grade-school Christmas recital, my local parish choir. But these days for me the innumerable renditions blend into such indistinction that “Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say / On a bright Hawaiian Christmas Day” can’t be told from “Buon Natale in Italy / Means a Merry Christmas to you.”
And yet, good or bad, distinct or indistinct, one carol or another snares me every year and tumbles me down — down into that Christmas world of time turned somehow less ephemeral: weightier, denser, and more real; a world where symbols are not symbols, anymore. One year it was a boy soprano singing “Once in Royal David’s City”; another year, a melancholy country-western recording of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentleman”; another year, an a cappella version of”Good King Wenceslas.”
I can find no unity in the passing years’ various triggers of Christmas, save perhaps that they come during the carols’ less-familiar verses, at a line with some explicit Christian piety and heft. “Mild, he lays his glory by, / Born that man no more may die,” I heard in “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” on the car radio one year as I drove home, and home was newly bathed in that old, familiar light. “God is not dead nor doth He sleep,” from Longfellow’s ” I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” the carolers sang another year outside my door, and it rose — and it rose — and it rose like a torrent.
All the best writers about Christmas have known that the larger thing, the real moment, is unsayable: its memory triggered not by speaking of it but by waves of incidental detail. There is a reason that the goose in the butcher’s window is almost as big as the boy Scrooge sees when he throws open his window on Christmas morning in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol — a reason Lillian Smith spends so many pages on precise description of pecan harvests in her marvelous Memory of a Large Christmas. “In goes my hand,” Dylan Thomas writes in A Child’s Christmas in Wales, “into that wool-white bell- tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea — and out comes Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.”
I cannot say why, but the details of my own Christmas memories are mostly music. Last night I took my little daughter in my arms and sang for her the old, old songs. There is a world where shepherds still keep watch over their flocks by night. There is a world where oxen still kneel at midnight in their straw. There is a world where Wenceslas still trudges through that winter’s snow. There is a world, I whispered in her sleepy hair. There is a world where still.
