Today’s song
I Am Christmas is an unreleased recording from the New England based seasonal band Nowell Sing We Clear. Their pre-Christmas concerts were a beloved pre-Christmas tradition for many families from 1975 to 2014. Because I live on the West Coast and can’t go to their concerts, an annual tradition for me became checking their website to see if they had issued a new CD. I have all of their albums as well as their songbook.
The song’s lyrics were written by English folksinger and songwriter John Conolly; Bill Meek composed the music. John Conolly is best known in folk music circles for having written the classic Fiddlers’ Green in 1966. Soon after that he teamed up with Bill Meek and they have been frequent and prolific song-writing collaborators ever since. In their songbook Songs & Carols for Midwinter & Christmastide, Nowell Sing We Clear say:
Tony brought to the band this newly composed carol with its rich imagery. While paying homage to many of the ancient traditions, it speaks more to the emotional side of the season and the ways we find light during this dark time of year. Being a traveling band for so many years, we can easily relate to the line, ‘… guide the dusty wanderers home safely to your side once more.”
Conolly and Meek wrote I Am Christmas in 2007. The reference to “recently composed” probably does not mean that the song came to their attention soon after that time. The group’s repertoire mainly features songs that are over 100 years old.
This year the group will be reconvening on-line on Tuesday evening, December 7 at 7 pm EST for a program of songs and stories. It will be through their local library, the Brooks Memorial Library of Brattleboro, Vermont. The program will be free and accessible through the library’s website.
I like the honesty of today’s unreleased recording of I Am Christmas but it does not reflect the professional quality of their studio or concert recordings. Here is an example of a more-polished album recording. It is band member Andy Davis’ setting for the wassailing song Villagers All sung by the field mice in Chapter 5 of Kenneth Graham’s classic The Wind in the Willows. Click here.
Essay: Reminiscences of my childhood Christmases [word count 2822]
In the weeks leading up to Christmas the upcoming holiday seemed to touch every aspect of my childhood life. One of its biggest impacts came near the end: We had a two week Christmas Vacation which gave me more time for all of the activities described in my previous December 2 reminiscence about my childhood winters. But the impact began earlier than that. Many of my Christmas memories come from the weeks of preparation and anticipation leading up to the holiday itself.
The kick-off event for the Christmas season was the gathering with uncles, aunts and cousins on my father’s side of the family, always held on Thanksgiving (American). My grandfather, Eugene, had become a widower before I was born. He remarried a very devout woman named Cora at about the time of my birth. Since none of us grandchildren had ever known our real grandmother, we always knew her as Grandma. Unlike my maternal grandparents (who you will hear about later), they both loved having children around.
The party was really a buildup for Thanksgiving dinner. Grandma was a great cook, and the menu was the standard one for the occasion: turkey dinner with all the fixin’s. Grandma, my mother and my aunts, with whatever babies happened to be around that year, and busied themselves I the kitchen. Or maybe they mostly visited with each other. I don’t know. I wasn’t in the kitchen. All of us kids from toddler age up were in the living room with Grandpa and our dads and uncles. All of the men worked at the same place: the manufacturing firm that my grandfather had founded. Being together was no big thing for them. They settled down in the comfy chairs to get ready to watch the Thanksgiving football game, and we children were underfoot visiting and playing with each other and they enjoyed watching us.
Sometimes we would watch the grey shadows move around the tiny screen with them for a while. We knew that the dark-grey shadows were one team and the light-grey shadows were a different team, but we didn’t care and we soon got bored. That is when Grandpa brought out his gallon jar filled with pennies!
He and Grandma had been saving them for us all year. He would put the jar in the middle of the floor and tell us to divide them fairly. The older kids all had brought their blue cardboard penny-collection folders and were eager to fill their blank slots. The completeness of our collections correlated pretty closely with age. I was the third oldest grandchild. We all accepted my cousin Buck’s leadership: He was the oldest, had the fullest book, and rarely found coins in the jar to fill his few empty spaces. If he did we all rejoiced. We all tried to help each other fill their books, and upgrade the quality of coins they already had, and I don’t remember any arguments.
Dinner was timed to coincide with the end of football. I can’t remember much about dinners there except for being very stuffed at the end of them.
This all ended when Grandpa died, in the same year as my other grandparents. The tradition of a Thanksgiving extended family gathering continued but it moved to Uncle Hank and Aunt Irene’s house. It was pretty much the same format, but without Grandpa and the big jar of pennies it never felt like it was the same.
Throughout December my mother would bake what we thought of as Christmas cookies. I particularly remember little round ones covered in powder sugar that that she called snowballs. At school, our Friday afternoon art projects, and the little amount of music we had with the non-musical nuns, was beginning to all be about Christmas.
Sometime in early December we kids would look through the familiar Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogues and circle the items we most wanted. As far as we knew, these catalogues listed everything in the world. The items I circled were always in the toys section. Then I would write a letter addressed to Santa to tell him what I most wanted. Until I was about 8 years old the first item on the list would have a horse, but I think I knew that was a long shot. We all wanted horses but I never heard of a kid getting one. We would also go to a department store to sit on Santa’s lap and tell him what we most wanted for Christmas, and we would begin to make or buy our own gifts for the rest of the family.
About two weeks before the holiday our family would drive together to one of the pop-up Christmas tree lots to pick out our tree. We always got Douglas firs because the length of the needles was just right. My father would tie to the top of the car to bring home.
After giving the tree a day to warm up in the house we would decorate it with a true miscellany of decorations. There were strings of coloured lights, garlands, glass balls, and plastic Christmas figures. Some, like the angel for the top of the tree and two string of soft-glowing florescent globes, were from when my parents first got married. Others were things that we kids had made over the years. The final touch was the brittle, pre-plastic metal tinsel that we saved from year to year. It had to be spaced very carefully and evenly for full effect. At first, only my mother did that. Later, I like to think that I was pretty good at it too.
While we decorated the tree and put out other decorations the fireplace would always be ablaze and Christmas music was playing from either the radio or from my parents’ 78 rpm records. In fact, Christmas music permeated the season. In department stores and other public places the classic Christmas songs were played, with an approximately equal mix of secular songs and those with lyrics about the Nativity story. Things are changing in that regard these days.
On at least one evening as the holiday approached we would all ride in the car together to see the homes decorated with lights, and to look inside house windows at the lit-up Christmas trees. My parents and a baby were always in the front seat. Michele, I, and later Jaci, were in the back seat. Everyone called them Christmas lights and it never occurred to us that the cheerful decorations could be descended from any other tradition. Our views through the side windows were obscured by that same condensation that was so good at holding up paper snowflakes so we had to keep wiping the side windows off with our mittens.
We had another Christmas tradition involving lights. For nearly a month before Christmas we had an advent wreath in the center of the dinner table, with four large candles arising out of a ring of evergreen branches. [Note: Quick research says that this custom was derived from a Lutheran one that first appeared in Germany in the 19th century but had roots in the 17th century. It bears some resemblance to the Jewish hanukkiah ritual. I suspect that with further research I would find other possible pre-Christian roots for this midwinter lighting custom.]
Three of the Advent wreath candles were purple and one was pink. In the first week only one purple candle would be lit before dinner, and would stay lit throughout the meal. I do not remember if there was any special protocol involved other than that as we got older us kids were allowed to strike the match and light them under parental supervision. I also cannot remember if any special prayers were said during the lighting or extinguishment, but as throughout the year, Grace was always said before the meal. In the second week two purple candles were lit, and in the third week, one the pink candle was lit along with two purples. Beginning on the Sunday before Christmas all four candles would blaze, but in some years when a Sunday occurs shortly before Christmas this would be for only for a day or two.
Christmas Eve was filled with anticipation for the next day. One aspect of this is that is when we hung our Christmas stockings from the fireplace mantle. Our stockings were large and colorful, and had been knitted with each of our names on them that my mother. It is the only knitting that I remember her ever doing.
By the time I was about 7 or 8 years old I was considered old enough to attend Christmas Midnight mass with my father. Whatever age I was, this was a great honour. He was devout and never would have brought me if he thought doing so would detract from his experience of Midnight mass. Even as a young child I knew that midnight high masses were held only twice each year, at Easter and Christmas. Those midnight masses were the pinnacle of Catholic Church sacredness and pageantry.
Like other high masses I had attended (10:00 mass on Sunday mornings) there would be music from our church choir and our mighty pipe organ, a ceremonial procession entrance by the three priests, with the front filling the church with the smell of frankincense and the sound of the chains of the incense burner rattling.
Our parish church and the church school that I attended were called Holy Childhood. Our parish priest, Fr. Buchanan, made sure that Christmas midnight mass was very, very special indeed. Our pipe organ and parish choir (led by a choirmaster who would later compile the official American Catholic hymnal) were supplemented by professional musicians from the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra. The front of the church was spectacularly adorned with poinsettias and a forest of greenery behind elegant dress and tuxedo clad musicians and their gleaming brass instruments.
Fr. Buchanan would wear the glittering white and gold vestments he had donated to our church. I knew from my parents that he was a diocesan priest. They do not take a vow of poverty, and he came from a wealthy family. He had donated a full set of very fine vestments, in the four basic colours plus two optional ones. The different colours were for different kinds of days on the liturgical calendar. They had been elaborately hand-embroidered by cloistered nuns in France. The participation in our Christmas services by professional symphony musicians was also an annual gift that he made to the congregation.
I think I went to at least eight midnight masses with my father at Holy Childhood. We always had to get to church at least an hour early to ensure we got a place in a pew. The pageantry and mass were always at least as beautiful as I anticipated but eventually I would fall asleep, probably about 1:00AM.
After mass was over my father would wake me up so we could go home in our car that he knew would be needed. Every year it was indeed a wonderful experience! Once Dad and I went to an Easter midnight mass at the cathedral, where the Bishop presided over the high mass. On the ride home we both agreed that our parish church had more spectacular pageantry than the cathedral, and Fr. Buchanan’s vestments were fancier than the bishop’s.
On Christmas morning, my Mother woke the other kids to take them to a very early mass while I slept in. Michele remembers that it was still dark when they returned from church. Even for my devout parents, other than the masses and brief graces said before meals, the rest of Christmas Day would entirely be secular celebration.
When my mother and sisters returned home someone would wake me to come downstairs: me in my pajamas and my sisters in their Sunday-best dresses. We delighted at the sight of the many Christmas presents in their many colours of wrapping paper piled under the tree, and our plumped up knit stockings. Most of the gifts we had gotten from Santa, as with the little items in the stockings. Some of those were little toys, and some were practical items like toothbrushes. There was always candy, which gave the toothbrushes a reason for existence. Santa was pretty clever that way.
First, we dug into our stockings and ate some of the candy to keep us going. Breakfast could wait! The presents were what Christmas was all about for us kids and we couldn’t be expected to wait patiently any longer. My mother would begin handing us each our presents, and my father would film the whole thing with his 16 mm movie camera. My mother always knew which of Santa’s gifts was the best one that should be saved for last.
As we got our gifts from my mother we would all rip the wrapping paper off and open our presents at the same time in a wild flurry of excitement. Playing with them could wait: I wanted to see what was in the next box tagged with my name. Some boxes had new clothing to replace what we had outgrown, but others had the very toys that we had asked Santa for. After the opening was done we would show each other what we had received and begin to play with our new toys while my parents prepared our traditional special Christmas breakfast of French-Canadian tourtière made days earlier from a traditional family recipe, and rich crêpes Suzette.
In the afternoon we would go for a gathering of the extended family on my Mother’s side of the family. Until I was 8 years old that was held at my mother’s childhood home, a large red-stone Queen Anne mansion that had been built in the 1880s. It had high ceilings, which would have been able to hold a very tall Christmas tree, but I can’t remember there being any Christmas decorations at that house except a wreath on the front door and an ornate centerpiece on the very large dining-room table around which we all could sit.
I was the second eldest of the grandchildren who lived near St. Paul. Two of my mother’s French-speaking older sisters had married husbands they met at University and they had moved to Quebec and Paris. At that gathering the adults gathered together to visit with each other in the living room, and children were to be seen and not heard. Actually, being seen was not as important as not being heard. We grandchildren could sit around and listen to them (my favourite place was hiding behind the velvet couch) or we could go exploring around the house. Exploring was more fun.
I remember exploring with my adventurous older cousin Kathleen, who was two years older than me, her quiet sister Rita, and whichever younger kids tagged along with us. We would roam up to the spacious attic filled with exotic old-fashioned things, and down to the coal-bin in the basement (where we weren’t supposed to go.) We also snuck into my grandparents’ elegant Victorian bedrooms on the second floor, and into the not-for-kids parlour at the front of the first floor. We could go around in circles – not running -- up one set of stairs and down the other. Until we got caught doing so, we would slide down the long smooth bannister on the formal front stairway.
We always got a warm welcome in the kitchen from the cook/maid, Mae, who was in the kitchen preparing the lavish dinner. Opening our family gifts there was a much more sedate affair than it had been in the morning, with everyone taking their turns. My bachelor Uncle Louis always gave each child a $2 bill that he had cleverly folded origami-style to resemble a signet ring. These new rings were too big for our little fingers but those of us who weren’t babies or toddlers always wore them for the rest of the day anyway.
After my grandparents both died within a year of each other, the extended family gathering moved to my Aunt Cecile’s house. It seemed to be a long car ride away, but really it was just south of Minneapolis. It seemed like there were more children each year and the style of the gathering became much more children oriented.
We cousins showed or told each other about the Christmas gifts we had opened in the morning. Before the dinner (which was probably potluck) we had another round of opening gifts, this time presided over by Santa Claus himself! (For some unexplained reason my Uncle Bob always was missing during that part.) Eventually, after eating way too much food, the kids’ weariness began to show and the party ended. We drove home in the dark and I doubt that I ever made it home without falling asleep in the car.
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