The Atheist Who Stole Christmas

by Nicole Audrey Spector

How a guy who once pulled over the car upon espying a black glitter rosary on my neck (I was 12 and the rosary was from Claire's Accessories) was ever impelled to give the world a self-declared “Christmas Gift” is ironic. Yet my dad, in making A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector was hardly a grinch won over. I don't exaggerate when I say that he'd rather have a tick burrowed in his ear than a sentimental Christian on his back. Or a sentimental Jew for that matter (though one may elicit from him a gentle smirk, a boyhood memory). My dad is so outrightly disgusted with religion that when something bad doesn't happen he says “Thank Darwin!”, a phrase I taught him when he told me he'd give me $500 if I read all of On The Origin Of Species. That's roughly a dollar per page. Add the exhaustive intro and afterthoughts I was also required to read and you have about half that. Not to mention I'd have to provide written notes. Still, not a bad deal for a kid, right? Well, I was 23 and unable to finish it. Point is, my Pops' Christmas music has nothing to do with Christian folklore – it indeed dispossess Christ from Christ-mas, and is concerned only with a mirth and merriment that is wholly secular.

When I visited my dad last Sunday and imparted the news of Christopher Hitchen's death, he gazed at my Einstein T-shirt and frowned. “Einstein should have been more outspoken about the non-existence of God,” he said. A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector may as well be called The Atheist Who Stole Christmas or, if you want to get silly, It's My Birthday, Too; So What? – for my father was born on Christmas Day. Around this time of year a lot of people tell me, “You know, it doesn't feel like Christmastime until I listen to your Dad's Christmas album.” The key word is feel. Christmastime, in again the secular sense, has a distinct essence and texture. It's busy, buttery, effulgent, and loud – pairing well with the lavish mania that distinguishes The Wall Of Sound. Nearly 50 years after its incipient release, A Christmas Gift For You is emblematic of an era long gone, but it's not the 1963 time stamp on the work that induces nostalgia. Songs like “Winter Wonderland”, “Frosty The Snowman”, and “Parade Of The Wooden Soldiers” (my childhood favorite) feel to have been born nostalgic, dreamed up in a reverie of how good it feels to be a child at Christmastime. The one original song on the album, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” pines for a Christmas past with Darlene Love belting, “They're singing 'Deck The Halls'/But it's not like Christmas at all/'Cause I remember when you were here/And all the fun we had last year.”



Perhaps my dad had a bit of the Christmas blues himself growing up. He and his older sister, Shirley, were brought up sparingly in a strict but struggling Jewish household. Christmas was of course not observed and though Hanukkah was I can't imagine it was a hugely happy affair. My paternal grandfather Ben suffered from acute diabetes and ended his life when my father was nine, leaving my Grandma Bertha (after whom my dad's record label Mother Bertha Music is coined) to raise the two kids on her own. She moved the family to L.A, where my dad snuck into jazz clubs and at 14, met his hero: jazz guitarist Barney Kessel. It wasn't long under Kessel's wing before my Dad decided that he would never be as good a guitarist as the remarkably under-recognized genius – “not even a close second”, he says, and so, he turned his ambitions toward record making. In my father's few shared memories of growing up, seldom do I get the sense that he was ever doing much of anything aside from growing up – working as hard as he could to assume responsibility for his family. Even the move to L.A from NY, when he couldn't have been more than 12, he remembers as a vehicle for equipping him with the tools he needed to become a young success – to make it big fast.

As far as the family my dad co-created with my mother, Janis, much later in life (he was 42 when my twin brother Phillip. Jr. and I were born) goes, we were raised on Christmas. Hanukkah was there, but off to the side, a corner piece of piety we were unsure how to regard. Phillip and I took turns lighting the menorah (Grandma Bertha probably had one for every light socket in her home), but we didn't quite know what to do with a holiday that, next to Christmas, was so complicated and sombre, so...holy. When Grandma Bertha gave us a dreidel to play with, Phillip and I just stared at it and exchanged worried glances, hoping Grandma would walk away so we could play with real toys.

Jewish as Grandma Bertha was (she took great care in teaching my Mexican Catholic mother how to be a good Jewish wife, mentoring her in the making of many a matzoh ball soup and potato latke), she indulged us our Christmas. Every year she dug the same plastic tree out of a closet, along with other customary Christmas junk – light up Santas and reindeer, boxes of candy canes. Always a sucker for kitsch, my dad would create his own mega marshmallow world in our foyer – replete with fake box presents under a dazzling Rockefeller tree. But the true Christmas fanatic, on either side of my family, was my dad's older sister, Shirley. A virtual Mrs. Claus, Aunt Shirley stormed into rooms with literal bells on, singing the Christmas hits. My father couldn't stand her. She seemed to physically make his skin crawl. Twenty minutes into her company and he was on the brink of a genuine eczema outbreak. To me she was the most wonderful person in the world. She was a brilliant woman, I later learned, but disturbed. She'd go missing for months and eventually years at a time, abducted by some secret darkness in her mind. I only ever saw her as ebullient, glowing. She was a guaranteed presence on Christmas day. She arrived at our house in the late afternoon (the earliest my father would let her in) with her annual trunk load of presents for me and Phillip, singing all the way up our driveway.

A fragment of one such Christmas afternoon exists on VHS, when Phillip and I were about 6 years old. Before the Record button was hit Aunt Shirley somehow guilted my father into getting out his electric guitar. She starts to sing a pitchy falsetto “Silent Night” and my dad strums obediently along, each chord appearing to hurt his face. “All is caaallllm,” Aunt Shirley sings, with proud bravado, “All is brighhhht.” He doesn't let her get very far, abruptly transitioning into “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”. Aunt Shirley wavers but catches on – used to him changing things up without prior consult. Two verses into that song and my dad ditches Christmas altogether, digressing into an improv jazz bit none of us understand. Aunt Shirley, jilted, but ever-joyous, takes the camera from my mother and interviews her niece and nephew, truly her favorite people in the world, about their Christmas day. “Such a beautiful family,” she says. The camera shuts off.

That video is the only evidence of my mother, father, brother, and me together. There are no family photos. It's the only recording of Aunt Shirley, as far as I know, that exists. She's at least 50 years old there, and as fragile and beautiful as I imagine she was as a girl, that remarkably bright girl whose mind shattered when her father left. It's one of the only videos of Phillip, Jr. A few years later, when we were nine he succumbed to a complicated illness. He died just a few days before Christmas. I don't remember our last Christmas together, but this one on tape looks like it was pretty good, and it's the one that makes every Christmas since feel not like Christmas at all.

Download:

"Sleigh Ride" mp3
by the Ronettes, 1963.
available on A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

"Parade of the Wooden Ships" mp3
by the Crystals, 1963.
available on A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

"Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" mp3
by Darlene Love, 1963.
available on A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

"White Christmas" mp3
by Darlene Love, 1963.
available on A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector