Volume 25 Issue 4 - December 2019 / January 2020

REAR VIEW
MIRROR
LUCA PERLMAN
Merry,
Um,
Holiday!
ROBERT HARRIS
It’s getting to be that time of the year again.
When once more I have to bear witness
to my follies.
Here goes.
I’m Jewish.
And I love Christmas carols.
There, now I’ve said it.
I’ve loved carols ever since I piled into the yellow school buses
waiting for us kids outside Hillcrest Public School at Bathurst and
St. Clair to ferry us down to Simpson’s basement at Yonge and Queen
in early December to sing our little hearts out for harried shoppers.
(As you can see, I’m also old.) And, while there, little Robert would
thrill to the music in ways I only later learned why. We Grade Fours
loved to end the first stanza of Good King Wenceslas with an exaggerated
“gath - ring winter few – oooo – el.” Only later did I realize
we were singing a plagal cadence, which had basically disappeared
from Western music 600 years previously. And there was something
remarkably brilliant and beautiful in Angels We Have Heard on High,
because, I now know, the Gloria in excelsis Deo which I was belting
out in my innocence had been sung in the West since the 13th century,
due to an injunction from Pope Leo IV, more or less exactly as I was
singing it beside the men’s sock department in Toronto in 1958.
The music of Christmas is one of the great cultural treasures of
modern Western Civilization. It’s like a musical archaeological dig.
Without realizing it in the slightest, at this time of year, we happily
and unselfconsciously (or we used to) sing music from medieval
times, the Renaissance, the classical period, and on up to the present
day, with contributions by Felix Mendelssohn (Hark the Herald Angels
Sing is based on a tune from one of his cantatas), Handel (Joy to the
World is a clever variation on two sections of Messiah) and many
other less-famous but no-less-able composers. I’ve always loved the
music of Christmas, much to the consternation and bewilderment of
my Jewish friends, who cannot for the life of them understand why
I’m glorifying the Christ child and the theological axioms of the religion
based on his teachings, in my enthusiasm for Adeste Fidelis.
And I try to tell them that the traditional music of the season isn’t
about religion at all, really – that there are lots of carols that have no
religious content in the least, from O Tannenbaum to Good King
Wenceslas; that, in fact, carols were first sung outside of the church as
an explicit populist repudiation of the morose theological seriousness
around Christmas, that they’re really a form of ancient pop music,
(which is why the modern carols, from White Christmas to Have
Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, almost all written by Jews, fit so
easily into the Christmas spirit). My Jewish friends are having none of
it. Christmas, for them, is dim sum on December 25. I’m a traditionalist
without a tradition.
So you might think that I would be somewhat sympathetic to what
has become a recently newly minted holiday ritual, the bleatings
and screechings from certain quarters about “a War on Christmas,”
a war, it seems, waged by means of insidious demands that we say
“Happy Holidays” instead of ”Merry Christmas” to people we meet on
the street, and re-name, in an act of blazing and audacious political
correctness, those excruciating musical gatherings in our local schools
“Holiday Concerts” instead of their rightfully named “Christmas
Concerts.” The “Holiday Tree,” shocking in its blasphemy, is part of the
conspiracy as well.
Given my carol obsession, I guess I should be sympathetic to these
arguments – but I’m not sympathetic to them at all.
At their best, they are stupid and childish, at their worst, dare I say
it, defiantly un-Christian in their intent and spirit. As I understand it,
the person whose birthday we’re celebrating on December 25 was the
one named the Prince of Peace, the one who endorsed the sentiment
to love thy neighbour as thyself. Can’t imagine he would have minded
that we adjusted the traditions and rituals around his birthday to
make them more inclusive, more sensitive, more welcoming.
If I thought the argument about the “War on Christmas” was
even remotely made in good faith, there’s a lengthy discussion I
could initiate about the history of changes to the celebration of
Christmas over a millennium, which make our contemporary
adjustments in effect, very traditional. The Christmas celebrations
we revere now as ancient and unchangeable, in fact go back
just over 150 years, to Victorian England. Christmas was banned by
Cromwell’s Puritan Revolution in the mid-1660s in England, (as it
was in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, jail time the penalty for celebrating
the season in early Boston); it wasn’t really until Dickens’ A
Christmas Carol that the celebration of the season was recovered.
And the so-called traditions of Christmas, which supposedly cement
their Christian heritage, were all borrowed from other cultures –
gift-giving from pagan Roman solstice rituals, the evergreen tree
as a symbol of life in death from ancient Egypt, even Santa Claus
from the Dutch name for Saint Nicholas, Sinter Klaas, although the
December 2019 thewholenote.com