Muddle & Hope
Songs, Shared Experience, and Survival in 2020
My wife and I played Christmas music in mid-October this year. A new record. We get an occasional holiday insurgent in our playlists now and then, but this was A Charlie Brown Christmas, from front to back. With some Bing for added for good measure. The maples out our window still held the majority of their leaves. Green at the base gave way to golds, which gave way to reds. Only a few bare branches at the crown. The holidays weren’t evident visually yet, but we needed to feel them.
We weren’t alone. In our small town in Midcoast Maine, many had thrown lights up already, after a freakishly early flurry. A handful of others had never taken them down from when they put them up in mid-March — an attempt at a hopeful and positive distraction as the pandemic was showing its teeth in places like Boston and New York.
It’s not hyperbole to call this an era of shared tragedy. For many it was gradual. We’d been wading into this feeling since 2016. Icy water creeping up our legs, making our hearts race and our breathing shallow and erratic. The pandemic was the moment we surrendered and sank in completely. For those who weren’t sharing the experience, 2020 has been the year that the dock collapsed, plunging the last of the spectators in. We’re all neck deep in icy water now, whether we are mourning a loved one, the loss of a job, or the lives we used to lead before all this happened.
Tragedy or jubilee, shared experience can saddle all things with meaning. Giving them the mass and gravity necessary to etch themselves into the culture and stay there for generations. Many of the Christmas standards that make it to our playlists are from the years during and immediately after WW2. Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, and Frank Sinatra are all products of my grandparent’s generation, but they serve as the foundation to my holiday experience in spite of them being inherited, not earned.
The 1942 song “White Christmas,” in spite of its very specific geographical cues, was poignant for those deployed during WWII and their families whether they were from the north woods or the Texas panhandle. In 1943, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” resonated with the same audience. Then there’s “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,” which came out of Meet Me In St. Louis in 1944, as the war was approaching it’s peak. The movie is set in 1904 and generally very silly, and who can blame the audience for the desire to look backward to a time before both world wars and an influenza pandemic?
The violence and death of the audience’s past and present still seep in though, through the dialogue of the precociously morbid 7 year-old Tootie, whose fantasies include contracting multiple deadly diseases, bodies being crushed under trolleys, and blood gushing like fountains from gunshot wounds.
All of these grisly non-sequiturs aside, after an hour and a half of superficiality, the national mood reveals itself with a song of singular emotional weight. “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,” is about the unique melancholy longing that great holidays hold. It’s an ode to being apart, born out of a moment with millions of G.I.’s overseas and their young wives, children and aching families at home, thousands of miles away.
Many of us will have smaller holidays this year. Over a quarter million loved ones are forever missing from the festivities. For millions of others, our tables will feel especially small and vacant as we forgo travel, tradition and getting together in large groups — a shared sacrifice many are choosing to make for the betterment of the country.
While not universal, the weight of absence this holiday season shines a light on how precious, fleeting and fragile life is. We will miss the aging parents we can’t hug. The siblings we can’t fall asleep by the fire with. We will fear that our nieces and nephews, who are growing too fast, will barely recognize us when we see them again.
For those with loved ones deployed and in harm’s way, this feeling is all too familiar. For the great majority though, this will be the first time we collectively feel, in ultra-high definition, the equal parts hope and terror that lace the lyric: “Someday soon, we all will be together…if the fates allow.” In 2020 those fates have gone from a distant concept — a hollow pang at best — to standing in the room with us.
The last four words are both a memento mori and a reminder that we can, and must, hold out hope. Many, if not most of us will be together again. If the fates allow. “Until then,” as the song suggests, “we’ll have to muddle through somehow.” Maybe focus on what we can do instead of what we can’t. Make more calls than usual. See each other in miniature on Zoom. Hang a shining star, light a menorah, and observe the waning weeks of the year by doing our best to keep healthy and be ready for when we can see each other again.
Perhaps, in a silver lining that’s as big as the cloud, the brutality that’s unfolding in our homes and hospitals and personal economies — and the collective experience that results — will give us a shared foundation to stand on. From there we can build our own futures, and write the songs that will honor and illustrate our common bond for future generations.
