So Bring Us Some Piggy Pudding

In a moment of near anguish this week, I dumped my collection of Christmas cassettes in the garbage can. Since I haven’t had a working cassette player for at least five years, it was long overdue. I was sad to say good-bye to the virtuosity of the Canadian Brass, reminiscent of a magical December night in Cleveland when we treated ourselves to their oasis of joy in the middle of a hectic holiday season. We also spent many December hours in the van with our young sons, and often sang along with Goofy and his five onion rings (“Twelve Days of Christmas”) and Miss Piggy’s “piggy pudding.” Farewell, dear friends.

As the lovely Madelyn Simone and the delightful Elizabeth Holiday sang along with a Christmas CD on the way to Ashland last week, Madelyn asked how I knew all those songs. I replied, “It seems like I’ve been singing them forever.” My enchantment with Christmas music began with the lead-in for Channel Four’s Santa Show, as children across Western New York waited impatiently for Santa’s appearance, along with his silly sidekick Forgetful. The orchestral version of LeRoy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride,” with the crack of the whip and the whinny of the horse, still triggers a sense of anticipation learned in the living room on Klinger Avenue.

I’d rock in the rocking chair for hours listening to the “Holiday Sing-Along with Mitch Miller,” engraving those arrangements in the music section of my brain. My early favorite was the progressive song that concluded with the refrain, “Must be Santa, must be Santa, Santa Claus.

While I did my share of singing about Rudolph and his nose “like a lightbulb,” many of my Christmas carol memories are steeped in the music of the church. We traditionally processed from corner to corner of the sanctuary with the Quempas Carol, and one snowy night, greeted  parishioners with singing from the rooftop of the church vestibule. That performance was never repeated – those engineering types always put a damper on artistic brilliance. My Christmas carol indoctrination wasn’t complete, however, until I met the green “Caroler’s Favorites,” the tunebook used for playing at The Salvation Army kettle. Hand me a baritone horn, and the third part flows automatically, ingrained from hours of playing those sixty or so carols at the entrance to Grand Central Station in the Big Apple.

For centuries, the narrative of the nativity was preserved in many of those same melodies. The singing began on a hilltop near Bethlehem, where angels greeted the arrival of the newborn child with notes of joy: “Gloria in Excelsis Deo.” I doubt they sang in Latin, but we still repeat those familiar syllables each Christmas. Narrative carols such as “The First Noel” and “We Three Kings” were used to teach the Christmas story to generations of non-literate people, while composers such as Charles Wesley used carols to develop theological concepts. “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” is a good example.

The music of Christmas has expanded exponentially since those initial angelic glorias. Tiring of the angels, shepherds and kings, composers began to write of animals and other characters far beyond the scriptural record. Musicians sang of the friendly beasts at the manger, three ships, a good king (Wenceslas), a torch-bearing girl (Jeanette Isabella), a drum-beating boy, and a hippopotamus-seeking child. Movie-makers got in the act as well, giving us soon-to-be classics such as “White Christmas,” “Silver Bells,” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Even Charlie Brown added to the repertoire, with the three-note minor motif of “Christmastime is Here.” But I can live without the contribution of “Neptune’s Daughter,” “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

For Bess Streeter Aldrich, Christmas Eve was “a night of song that wrapped itself about you like a shawl. But it warmed more than your body. It warmed your heart . . . filled it, too, with melody that would last forever.” Bess and I aren’t related by blood lines (it’s a long story), but we share a kindred Christmas spirit. Cassette or CD, playlist or piano, the melodies and the memories created during the days and nights surrounding December 25^th warm my heart, and I seldom tire of the echo of their notes.