Jenifer’s Shelter Island Journal: A Merry Little Christmas

It’s Saturday — back a week ago I was torn between Ho-Ho-Humbug and A Pain In the Neck as the working title for this column.

Yes, I’d managed to finally move into my lovely new digs by Thanksgiving and surrounded by family and good food it was all wonderful life.

But then my birthday, which I’ve always considered to be the joyful inauguration of the Christmas season, “gifted” me with a nasty cold and a flare-up of my now-chronic neck pain which finally convinced me, as I haltingly turned 78, that not only was I not younger than springtime,  I’m not younger than anything.

But so what?  Wars, famine, democracy, the environment — it’s all going to hell in a handbasket anyway, so who cares?

Awash in this acidic dispirit of the season, made worse by the inexorable approach of Christmas itself, I was in my daughter’s living room at 7:30 this past Monday morning, waiting to take my grandkids to school, when the ubiquitous “Alexa” started playing Sinatra’s version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

There can be little dispute, (right?) that whoever the artist, that has to be the finest, most deeply moving modern classic Christmas song. And just like every other year when I hear it for the first time — humbug or not — I begin to cry.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

Let your heart be light

Next year all our troubles will be out of sight …

What a modest little Christmas wish, wrapped in an acknowledgment that, though things have been tough, troubles, too, will pass. Nothing grand or global like “Peace on Earth,” just an affectionate little notion that things will get better.

Songwriters Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine wrote the classic song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” for Judy Garland’s 1944 movie, “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

In a 2010 online article for npr.org, “The Story Behind Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” the author recalls that “… in 1989, Martin and Blaine, who have since died, joined Terry Gross on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ for a discussion about their lives and the story of ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,’ which has since been recorded by scores of musicians …

The song ‘began with the melody,’ Martin said. ‘I found a little madrigal-like tune that I liked but couldn’t make work, so I played with it for two or three days and then threw it in the wastebasket.’ Luckily, Blaine had heard the tune, too — and told Martin it was too good to throw away.

‘We dug around the wastebasket and found it,’ Blaine recalled.” Apparently the first draft was too sad, and Judy Garland asked for a revision, so they wrote a second version — the one we hear in the movie.

Actually, I’ve heard that story before and have always wondered what was meant by ‘too sad.’ The plotline of the movie calls for the tearful departure from their beloved hometown the family must make in light of the father’s new job in New York City — sad enough — but, though the song’s writers don’t mention it, they wrote it while the world was still embroiled in World War II, when many leave-takings ended up being tragically permanent.

That’s what gets me every time — the heart of the song isn’t about silver bells or Santa Claus, but the simple, seminal prayer that people always pray, all over the world every day: that they and the people they love might have a chance to reunite someday.

Once again, as in olden days

Happy golden days of yore

Faithful friends who are dear to us

Will be near to us once more —

In the middle of the Vietnam war, my older brother was sent over to fight, while my kid brother started college here in the U.S. and I went to join my fiancé who had been stationed at NATO/SHAPE headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

A crazy year for me, one of equal parts wonder and terror. There was a man on a bicycle who delivered telegrams —often I could hear him ringing his bell as he came down our cobblestone street to make a delivery. One early Sunday morning his bell stopped at our door.

I panicked immediately. My by-then-husband opened the telegram and had to keep saying “Jon’s home, Jon’s safe.”

That Christmas, somehow, we were all back home together again in Roslyn, NY, USA — with our parents, our family, our friends all standing around the piano singing carols and yes, crying. Moments like that — any time, at any age — are always “Christmas.”

Someday soon, we all will be together

If the fates allow

Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.