Good Tidings: Christmas In The Heart

by Polly Bresnick

I'm half Jewish, half Christmas. Jew-ISH. My family lights the menorah when we remember to, usually uncertain of which night we're on, and we mumble out the prayer that even my father barely remembers, with a crescendoing finale of SHALL HANUKKAH! Or is it with a "Ch-"? Does it have an "h" at the end? (I'm barely "culturally Jewish," which is to say that I'm not really religious at all.)

In grammar school I learned that, for Hanukkah, kids traditionally received eight presents — one on each of the holy, candle-lit nights. Also, there was a dreidel and gelt. That all sounded pretty good. On Christmas, of course, children awoke to find piles of gifts under the tree. Also a very appealing concept to my greedy little kid mind. Since I was both, I was thrilled to realize that maybe I'd get to do both! I did. Sort of. But then the deep holiday laze kicked in, and the Hanukkah gifts were skipped. I didn't complain — there were still plenty of Christmas gifts. One year the laze deepened and I was just on the brink of losing track of my belief in your favorite fat man and mine, the one and only chimney diver, bearer of brightly wrapped and bowed boxes, still cold from the icy pole from whence they came, Mr. Santa Claus. My parents figured they could get more sleep on Christmas Eve if they got some of the wrapping done in the weeks before the special day and put them under the tree as they wrapped. I must have gotten confused about my combo-faith (or just uncontrollably impatient for toys), because I started to sneak one present a day back to my bedroom to unwrap in the solitude of my room, hushed and high on the adrenaline of a child's crime. Didn't take long for my parents to notice. They were pretty mad. As Dylan himself laments on his Theme Time radio show, "Some people just don't have the spirit of Christmas. They think it's all about gift-giving. Though, to be more honest, I think a lot of 'em think it's more about gift-getting. Christmas is not about runnin' around the stores, spendin' money, and tryna' buy people's love and affection." It's about a lot of things. Including comfort, joy, figgy pudding, and music.

I love Christmas music. My mom was/is an old-school, screamin' and faintin' Elvis fan, so we have plenty of Elvis Christmas music. I like that "Silent Night" can sound kind of sexy in Elvis's voice. I can't seem to sing along to his "Blue Christmas" without lowering my eyelids and letting my top lip quiver. And I know the lazy velvet of Bing's Christmas repertoire like I know the smell of fresh baked bread. I impatiently look forward to it all year long like a little kid waiting for the first snowfall sticky enough for snowball wars and snow forts and snowmen. But those guys were church-going, God-fearing Christians, right? They can sing those songs however they want to and it will all sound like golden gospel. Those same songs in Bob Dylan's (née Zimmerman's) voice come out as a different gospel, and one that feels no less true. Dylan's voice singing Christmas songs is sweet and comfy. It conjures the gauzy memory of sitting on the rug next to the teetering, over-ornamented tree, when I was too young to even quite know who Santa was or what Christmas meant or that those big shiny colorful boxes had toys in them, but knowing all the words to all the songs and smiling with easy joy because if Christmas music is playing, it must be Christmas.

I first heard Dylan's polka-romp cover of "Must Be Santa" when it was meming around as a music video. It's the stand-out song on Christmas in the Heart, for me. It has a Santa-gone-wild, runaway sleigh energy that truly warms my halfie heart. And it's a weird roller-coaster dream to hear Dylan clowning the "ho, ho, ho's." The video is a little unsettling: Dylan's at a holiday house party and he keeps popping up unexpectedly. He's out of place, but comfortable, still enjoying himself, even amidst the maniacally smiley (super goy) partiers and the drunken chase-brawl that careens through things, sacrilegious and hip and honest in its interruption of the celebration of — what is it? — Christ's birthday? No one other than the camera notices the throwing of glasses or even the man swinging from a chandelier on his way out the door. Everyone, including Dylan, continues the song, knows all the words. The song itself, in humorous contrast to the adult-beverage setting, is a nursery rhyme list of Santa factoid essentials, an instruction manual for how to believe in Santa, a dictation of what to see in your mind's eye as you imagine him. So Dylan singing this song seems like proof that he may not exactly fit in at this Christmas party, but he still knows all the things there are to know about Santa. And really, what American doesn't?

This may offend some die-hard Dylan fans (and/or Tom Waits fans), but "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" comes out sounding a heck of a lot like a Tom Waits song (Dylan drawls it as "HAYrald Angels"), until his angelic back-up singers slip in, mugging sweetly in close harmonies, like the Boswell Sisters or some other assemblage of voices from another time that would sound just right on an old record player, the dustier the better. "Little Drummer Boy" is a bit over the edge for me. Hearing Dylan do the "ba-rum-ba-bum-bum" made me feel embarrassed for him. Though, again, the female back-up singers find some haunting slant-matched harmonies that give this track its own, new idiosyncratic personality. And, perhaps, maybe I just never liked singing this one. In junior-high chorus, I always imagined the little drummer boy as the baby Jesus — a personage I knew far too little about — which made me feel like I wasn't in the club, and maybe Santa wouldn't put anything but coal in my stocking that hung festively next to the rusting and tarnished menorah. Singing "Little Drummer Boy" in chorus as an awkward preteen atheist was about as comfortable as singing the same token Kwanza song every year, which is to say that it was no fun at all.

In "O' Come All Ye Faithful," "The First Noel," and "O' Little Town of Bethlehem," Dylan really does sound to me like a self-conscious Jew in a church (a feeling I have experienced on the few occasions I've been inside of an actual church during an actual service with singing and praising and whatnot). These are the songs I remember my gentile grandfather singing in a booming, choir-trained baritone beside a piano in a living room in Delaware with a fire roaring and "bubble-lights" (which, I believe, have been recalled due to the serious fire hazard they pose) bubbling merrily on the Christmas tree, though I'm not sure this did, in fact, ever happen in my life.

The rest of the album is perfectly reasonable 'round-the-yule-log fare, with some trickster flourishes here and there. Dylan's poetic sensibility sneaks in as he relishes the swinging alliteration of "Walking in a Winter Wonderland," letting all the w's wash together into a warm and cozy lullaby mumble. There's something deeply satisfying about the cheesy key modulations and boozy swaying rhythms of these songs that I really do know as well as some people know their prayers. I know them so well I don't remember learning the words, as if I were born with the knowledge of them — I know them in a way that really deserves to be described as "by heart" because I know them in my heart and not in my brain. One doesn't get in the Christmas "mindset" one gets into the Christmas spirit. It's reassuring to hear Dylan humoring this cross-section of melodies that I hold so dear. It's as if he's agreeing with me, that Christmas is not in the church or in Macy's or in Daddy Warbuck's Nutcracker-scale living room. It's truly in the heart. And I'm not afraid to say it if my ol' pal Bobby Zimmerman isn't.

Dylan has surprised us so many times, that even a Christmas album wasn't all that shocking to me. The man loves the music of the American everyman. And in this country, where, starting the day after Thanksgiving, it's difficult to find much else on the radio, it doesn't get much more universal than Christmas music. As silly as some of the songs may sound in Dylan's lupine sneer, he sings as if he loves these songs in the same ways I do — and he seems to be proving that these songs are for everyone to sing. As Christmas does in this country, these songs also, for the most part, transcend religion. They're part of the weird warm collective memory of Home and Childhood and Magic.

Download:

"Must Be Santa" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2009.
available on Christmas In the Heart

"Hark the Herald Angels Sing" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2009.
available on Christmas In the Heart

"Winter Wonderland" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2009.
available on Christmas In the Heart

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"Mistletoe" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2006.
from Theme Time Radio Hour: Christmas and New Year

"Figgy Pudding" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2006.
from Theme Time Radio Hour: Christmas and New Year

"The Night Before Christmas" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2006.
from Theme Time Radio Hour: Christmas and New Year


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