Nov/Dec 2024 (Volume 16, Issue 6)

 

By Arvid Huisman

 

If it hasn’t already started where you live, in no time at all we will be hearing Christmas music again. When it starts, you will hear the music of the season nearly everywhere you go and that’s okay with me.

 

Christmas music is one of my favorite parts of our observance of the holiday. From the majesty of “Oh Holy Night” to the silliness of “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” I love the music of Christmas. 

 

Music can touch our soul and then be stored in the deepest vaults of our mind’s memory bank. Rehearing the familiar strains of a favorite song can retrieve those memories and allow us to relive those special moments again in the theatre of our mind. 

 

 

The simple melody of “Away in a Manger” for instance, takes me back some 70 years to a Christmas Eve in a country church atop a hill in Hamilton County. Light fixtures hanging from a high ceiling cast a yellow glow over the pews packed with anxious parents, grandparents and uncles and aunts. A makeshift manger sits at the front of the chancel. In the straw rests a large doll, awaiting the leading role in the night’s performance.

 

In the church basement, the primary department girls, dressed in their holiday finest, look as good as they are going to look to the primary department boys. Some of them are being outfitted in sheets, cardboard wings and tinsel halos for their roles as angels. (Why did the girls always get to be angels?) 

 

I recall the sweaty discomfort of standing around, wrapped in a blanket, waiting to take my place on the stage as a Judean shepherd. Within minutes we are herded upstairs and seated, one class to a pew, to await our turn on the chancel platform. 

 

Whenever I hear the tune of “O Tannenbaum” the memory circuits zap me back to Jewell. It’s the late 1950s and my 5th grade class has the honor of performing as a living Christmas tree at the school’s annual program. 

 

I can see my classmates filing onto the risers — one on the top row, a few more on the second row, still more on the third and fourth rows until we form the shape of a Christmas tree. Nearly everyone wears a deep green smock. Nearly everyone, that is, except the kid at the top (who, I remember was dressed in something bright to represent a star) and myself. As the largest kid in the class, I was stationed at the bottom of this living Christmas tree dressed in a brown smock and serving as the trunk. I was typecast at age 10.

 

“I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree …” We recited Joyce Kilmer’s familiar poem in unison. 

 

Our part of the program ended with singing the English version of the old German musical salute to the Christmas tree — “O Tannenbaum.” It was a Scandinavian community; most of the audience probably wouldn’t have appreciated the German lyrics anyway.

 

Whenever I hear “White Christmas” my memory drifts back to when I was a young teenager in nearby Kamrar (my family moved frequently.)

 

My parents and four of my five siblings had gone to a Christmas Eve church service and left me at home to care for my one-year-old baby sister, Trudy. I pulled a rocking chair in front of the television set to pass the time while I rocked my sister. 

 

There wasn’t much on television that night and my mind wandered. Here I was, I thought, only a few years from graduating from high school. Christmas with the entire family would be changing; I didn’t think I would like that. I looked at my baby sister in my arms; I would surely miss her when I left home. 

 

From a living room window, I could see a single incandescent street light which cast eerie shadows on a blanket of new, fluffy snow. The snow hung like cotton batting from the edge of the roof of (great-great) Aunt Annie’s front porch across the street. 

 

I didn’t want one thing to change; I didn’t want to grow older and leave home. I didn’t want to experience a Christmas without Mom and Dad and my brothers and sisters. 

 

The time came when I left home to seek a life of my own and it all worked out fine. But I’ll never forget that white Christmas Eve when I was nearly 15. That scene from my young memory has replayed many Christmases since.

 

There are scores of Christmas songs, sacred and secular, that elicit these deep, sweet memories for many of us. It’s a special time of year and Christmas music is a special kind of music. 

 

Best wishes for a merry and meaningful Christmas.

 

(Arvid Huisman is a columnist for Iowa History Journal. He is retired after a lengthy career in the newspaper industry and as a development director for the Salvation Army in Central Iowa. To purchase an autographed copy of his latest book, “More Country Roads,” send $16.50 to Huisman Communications, 9602 Bishop Drive, Unit 59, West Des Moines, Iowa 50266.)

 

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