The melancholy floats by
I don’t know why I love Christmas music like I do, but it only takes the afternoon of Thanksgiving to get me to put the playlist on. Right now, I’m watching the water reflecting on the bayou that is moving steadily away from Lake Ponchartrain. Elvis Presley is singing Silent Night, Irma Thomas just finished Holy Night.
Sadness – these songs seem tinged in sadness.
Our house is crowded with menorahs on the counter, nuts in the African blood bowl that a friend gave me as a wedding present many years ago, there is the photo of Sam, my first Corgi, sitting on Santa’s lap with a Santa outfit on (I remember Santa’s wife running to her car saying she had just the right outfit for him), the Wedgewood Christmas tree that a friend bought me years ago with tiny porcelain ornaments and little bitty lights, there are blue lights flickering in the garden, and the shamash on the menorah flickering in the window.
Tin realizes something is happening. He snooped in a bag on the dresser and found the train tracks and railcars that haven’t been wrapped yet. All he asks is when Hanukkah is coming? When can we light the menorahs? So he can get his presents. He’s Hanukkah obsessed.
Kathleen Battle is singing Hark the Herald Angels Sing – her voice is ethereal and fragile almost to the point of breaking. She sounds like an angel. The light is being carried down the bayou on the water, the sadness comes and vanishes when each song ends, dreidels are in the red rubber bowl and now mariachis are singing Se Va Diciembre and the singer almost sounds like he’s crying.
November 30th is three years since my mother died. December 7th is three years since I met Tin. Tomorrow Loca goes to the country to live with the cousins.
Yet I’m happy and gay, with an overlay of sad and low, and all of these feelings run like a current as fast as the bayou moves just beyond these windows. The Chipmunks are singing All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth – which is an odd song for a chipmunk to be singing.
November 26th, 2012 at 6:57 pm
What a lovely description of all your conflicting feelings. I think as we get older, the holidays do that to all of us. I’m with you about the music. I won’t let myself start listening to it until Thanksgiving, then it’s full swing Christmas music–the bright and pepper (jingle bells) mixed in with the melancholy. I think I’ll go get more of my albums out right now! 😀
November 26th, 2012 at 6:58 pm
Oops! that should be peppy, not peppery. 🙄
November 29th, 2012 at 7:29 pm
I think you are right Alice – these dark days always make everyone think of those that are gone, time going by, and there seems to be this nonspecific yearning for something – I’m wondering if those of us who are getting older think about times when we wont be here or if it is more like missing those moments when we were young.