JUKEBOX: Post-Christmas Blues
As a kid, the day after Christmas was always my least favorite day of the year. All the sensory overload and emotional hype of the Christmas season, culminating in a sleepless Christmas Eve night and a Christmas Day full of frenzied present unwrapping and candy overdoses, inevitably led my spirits to come crashing down on December 26. As I’ve gotten older, the Christmas season itself has often been tinged with sadness, whether I’ve been missing someone close to me, taking end-of-the-year stock of my life and finding myself lacking, or simply feeling nostalgic for Christmases past. This week’s JUKEBOX spotlights some of my favorite songs about the more melancholy side of Christmas.
From the 2013 album Shifting Gears, Nancy Sinatra’s take on this song from the musical Mame strips away the frenzied energy of the original to find the sadness and desperation at its core. It’s a familiar sentiment for all of us who turn to Christmas as a distraction from literal and metaphorical darkness, and Sinatra’s interpretation reminds us that, inevitably, the reality of Christmas falls short of our imaginations.
There’s nothing like missing someone to make the holidays miserable, whether it’s a breakup (as in Joni Mitchell’s “River”) or simple physical distance (as in the Pretenders’ “2000 Miles”) keeping you apart. From Bing Crosby crooning Irving Berlin’s immortal “White Christmas” to Darlene Love begging her baby to please come home, most of the enduring Christmas songs of the last century have been about loss and longing: for a lover, for a family far away, or just for the nostalgia-sweetened Christmases of our childhood. Check out young Brian Wilson’s yearning take on “Blue Christmas,” and if that’s not heart-wrenching enough, there’s the wistful children’s choir on “Christmas Time Is Here,” from the classic special, A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Maybe your post-Christmas blues come with more of a social or political angle — or maybe you’re like me, and a family holiday just doesn’t seem right without a little guilt. Plenty of songs criticize the commercialization of Christmas, or challenge their listeners to use the holidays as a starting point for personal and social change. The Staple Singers ask, “Who took the merry out of Christmas?” and urge people who are otherwise “too busy fighting wars [and] trying to make it to Mars” to remember the religious angle of the holiday. Emerson, Lake, & Palmer’s song “I Believe In Father Christmas” looks at the Christmas story through the now-jaded eyes of someone who once believed: “They sold me a dream of Christmas/They sold me a silent night.” And on Jethro Tull’s “Christmas Song,” Ian Anderson snarls, “So how can you laugh when your own mother’s hungry/And how can you smile when the reasons for smiling are wrong?”
“When The River Meets The Sea” isn’t really a Christmas song. It’s a Paul Williams composition for the Muppet special Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, and in the story, it’s the old folk song that Emmet’s late father loved the best. The lyrics touch on creation, death, resurrection, and the meaning of life — heady stuff for the soundtrack to a show about cute woodland creatures who like to sing songs about eating barbecue and wearing silly bathing suits. But at its core, Emmet Otter is an introspective and melancholy little story coping with loss and holding onto hope, and “When The River Meets The Sea” may be a perfect way to close out a playlist about looking for comfort at the darkest time of the year.
