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Brooks Peterson
Brooks Peterson's column is published Mondays. Brooks also sits on the Caller-Times editorial board and can be contacted at petersonb@caller.com
Monday, December 13, 1999
'Twelve Days' can take a serious toll on jangled nerves
As enchanting a time as Christmas is, it inevitably brings in its train certain little strains. The interesting thing (to me, at least) is how they change over the years.
Consider the music of the season.
(I visited this subject some time back, truly faithful readers may recall. Am I permitted to quote myself here? You betcha.)
When I was a kid I reveled in the traditional carols. My favorite was, and remains, "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen." I always wondered who the gentlemen in question were, and what they were about. Its exhortation "let nothing you dismay" seems to me to capture in a single phrase the buoyancy of the season.
Then there was "We Three Kings," which I remember for an entirely different reason. Try though I may, I can never think of it without recalling the childish parody that was au courant at Maplewood Elementary one year:
"We three kings of Orient are,
"Tried to smoke a rubber cigar:
"It was loaded,
"It exploded . . ."
And so on.
Sacrilegious? Heretical? Perhaps. I felt a little guilty about it - but to this day I can't put those deplorable lyrics out of my thoughts.
The real difficulties, though, came in dealing with the secular Christmas songs that were being ginned out at such an alarming rate back then. To me, "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer" raised all sorts of social-justice issues: Why should a nasally challenged creature be so cruelly ostracized. "Frosty the Snowman"? There was a bummer: Here's a protagonist who's going to melt away on you, for crying out loud,
The absolute worst, though, was "Santa Claus is Coming to Town": With his list and his monomaniacal determination to figure out who's been naughty and nice, this was a pretty sorry excuse for a jolly old elf. Wasn't Santa being just a tad judgmental? Should kids be placed under this kind of pressure?
Of course, the passing of the years has enabled me to work my way through most of these concerns. But a few problems linger on.
Case in point: "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer." Now, this country-western ditty was mildly amusing the first couple of hundred times I heard it, but it grows more and more dreary with every repetition. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that I know of a moral certainty that the people responsible for unleashing this thing on an unsuspecting public continue to rake in megabucks for their trouble.
Happily, some of the musical excesses of the season recede with time. Take "The Little Drummer Boy." In itself, it has a certain charm to it - certainly it's more appealing than "Grandma" - but it has been a victim of its own success. For several years, you couldn't step inside a shopping mall or twiddle a radio dial without being rewarded with a "Pa Rum Pum Pum Pum" for your trouble. It was enough to drive you to cower in the root cellar until the danger passed.
Mercifully, however, our drummer boy has been given a break. Did he join the musicians' union? At any rate, he is no longer the dominating presence he once was, and I think he and we are the better for it.
Which leaves . . . The Twelve Days of Christmas.
The song, that is. Didn't used to bother me that much. Perhaps it's an allergy I've acquired relatively late in life. Whatever, the explanation, my tolerance for lords a-leaping and maids a-milking has grown dangerously, almost alarmingly, low.
I thought I was making some progress against the syndrome a few days ago when I had relatively little trouble getting through a "Twelve Days" performed by an elementary school choir. The kids were so appealing, and their performance so exuberant, that the Scrooge in me just went away altogether.
Then came the Corpus Christi Symphony Orchestra's holiday concert Saturday evening, a highlight of which was . . . you guessed it.
With the greatest of good cheer, maestro William Buhidar and Symphony Society executive director Lee Gwozdz carried the audience through an experience that was in roughly equal parts sing-along and aerobic workout, with those in attendance springing to their feet when their partridge or turtle dove or French hen came into play. (This, you should know, was for the most part an audience of, shall we say, mature years. In light of that, the cooperation was exemplary.)
All right, then: I've been a good sport. But that's enough. The next person or entity that taxes me with "Twelve Days" is going to get run over by a reindeer.
Brooks Peterson
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