With so many things going on in the world to dismay and scare those who pay attention, from madmen holding power in so many countries to our own Gong Show in Ottawa, and because of the holiday time of year, I find myself remembering easier days when I was small, as were comforts.
But in doing so, I remember things weren’t necessarily less scary then, just differently scary. Christmas carols, for example.
Case in point: “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” The benevolent, jolly Santa of Coca Cola always made me a little uneasy. Perhaps it was the large bas-relief Santa that appeared on the living room wall the same day the Christmas tree appeared or maybe it was the department store Santas who always seemed to have eaten garlic just before I sat on their laps. Whatever the reason, my relationship with Santa wasn’t the stuff of Norman Rockwell paintings.
And that song always struck me as terrifying and threatening.
From the opening line, “You better watch out!” I was worried. What kind of threat is that? Don’t cry, don’t pout, don’t be naughty. What’s left? Can I at least eat, since you’ve cut out most of the rest of my favourite things?
Do you have any idea how discomforting it is to be told—as a kid who has a tendency to wake up in the middle of the night in a pitch-black room—“He sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake?” So the old perv is watching me, lying in bed, wide awake in the middle of the night, waiting to see if I’m going to be bad or good or just wet my bed because now I’m too scared to get up to pee? And he’s making a list he can check twice to determine whether I get the object of my Christmas desire or a lump of coal? Just shoot me now.
We had a neighbour who had a very cool, old Wurlitzer jukebox. Every Christmas he’d hang a speaker on the front of his house and bombard us with carols late into the evening. I found “Frosty the Snowman” chilling in more ways than one.
I was born in snowy Iowa the year after Gene Autry recorded “Frosty the Snowman.” I built a lot of snowmen as a small child. Thankfully, none of them ever came to life. But from the time I became aware of the words to “Frosty the Snowman,” it was something I lived in mortal fear of.
Frosty may have danced around after he magically came to life, but that was just the beginning. He was alive as he could be. He could laugh and play just the same as you and me.
I lived in a neighbourhood full of children, many of whom were older and bigger than me and not a few of whom enjoyed thumpetty thumping me. The last thing I wanted was a big fat kid made out of snow, swinging a broomstick in his hand, running over the hills of snow I could barely wade through, wanting to thump me and then mock me by yelling, “catch me if you can.”
Worse yet, he wasn’t even afraid of cops!
And why should he be? What could they do to him? Send him to juvie? He’d just melt and they’d only have a puddle on the floor to try and punish.
My snowman phobia wasn’t made any easier by the thought that even adults had issues with snowmen. There were the lines in “Winter Wonderland” about building a snowman in a meadow—I won’t even mention how incongruous that seems—and pretending he was a parson who could marry you and/or a circus clown. What is it with snowmen?
As I grew older, I found carols sometimes confusing. Pouring over maps of the world I never could find Orient Are. Still can’t.
And leading up to a concert of carols in grade school, I thoroughly alienated my fourth-grade teacher who, try as she might, couldn’t explain what exactly it meant to “certain” poor shepherds in fields as they lay.
“The first Noel the angel did say
Was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay....”
Being even then a bit of a language nerd, I was familiar with the word as an adjective or pronoun. But for the life of me I couldn’t understand what it was supposed to convey as, seemingly, a noun. What does it mean to certain someone? Can only shepherds be certained? Only poor ones? Can they certain each other or are angels required? Can ordinary people certain other people? Accidentally or on purpose? Could I certain a particular girl I was fond of? If so, would I get in trouble?
I didn’t want to ask her about certaining and admit my ignorance of all things certain. But she asked me, after we’d practiced the song, if I’d forgotten the words.
“No,” I responded. “I know the words.” “Well, if you know the words, why weren’t you singing?”
“Because I was wondering what certaining was. What does it mean to certain someone?”
That was when I learned a Grade 4 student should never ask a Grade 4 teacher a question she doesn’t know the answer to.
I’m pretty certain she’d never given much thought—clearly not as much thought as I’d given—to the question. It quickly became clear she was uncertain and hadn’t, until that very minute, bothered to ponder certain as a verb. She finessed an answer, told me the problem was the word “was” in the second line. Without it, the sentence made sense and they probably threw in an unnecessary was to make it flow. I thought it would flow just fine without the was but I wasn’t about to press the point any further.
I’m still a bit uncomfortable when December rolls around and carols begin to be, well, everywhere. But Merry Christmas anyway.
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And a final reminder about tonight’s reading of A Christmas Carol... the Dickens one, not anything we’re going to sing. It’s at the library, at 7 p.m. There’ll be angelic music—no lyrics—by Alison Hunter. Your favourite people, Happy Jack Crompton, Leslie Anthony, Belinda Trembath, Anne Townley, Chris Quinlan and me will do our best to entertain you and it’s free. But be thoughtful and let the library know you’re coming so they can put out a seat for you. Email them at: [email protected].
