In secret, I started listening to Christmas music on September 1st in my van. On October 1st, I turned Christmas jazz on while cooking in the kitchen when most people were out of the house—or at least not in the kitchen. Just after our first Nor’easter of the season at the end of October, my husband Bill snuck the electrician up into the kitchen from the basement. They had been outside investigating repairs on a line that a branch had taken down, and their unexpected entry from the back hall took me by surprise. Both of them stood in the kitchen chatting with me while I smeared honey mustard over chicken breasts; I looked into their eyes and willed them not to notice the holiday jazz Siri had tuned-in for me.
Around the same time, I let the Christmas jazz playlist slide through the van speakers while driving my nearly 16-year-old son Liam to school. The beauty of jazz, whether Christmas or other, is in the liberal, artistic arrangements: the Christmas undertones went undetected on the 20-minute drive to school. In all of these early listening cases, the songs were purely instrumental music. I’ll be more unapologetically freewheeling Christmas vocals after Thanksgiving.
Like a boar rooting for truffles in the forest, I’ve tracked multiple rationales for this annual tradition. First, the known is balm. No matter what is going down in real-life—uncertainty, organizing, dissension, Christmas songs are steadfast. Recognizable and comforting. The lulling sameness of their melodies, even in unusual arrangements, is predictable.
Second, the sounds put ablaze warm memories highlighting 50 years of Christmases. Granted, I know and have probably lived through a good number of challenging Christmas events, but I have an innate survival instinct of setting aside the bad memories. I would say it’s much like childbirth, but we are a family made through adoption, so I have no labor pains in my memory. However, this week a memory popped up from eleven years ago, from the October of breast cancer. I recalled the morning I was lying naked on a gurney at Massachusetts General Hospital when a tech tacked the end of a roll of masking tape to the top of my right breast then while holding that firmly in place, she pulled the roll with that indescribable zipping noise until the span of taut tape reached the bottom of my right knee. All this was done with no explanation, until I asked her what the hell she was doing. “Trying to put a port in with you lying down won’t work because of all the flesh, so we tape your breast to your knee to simulate the pull of gravity.” Rendering works truck drivers, who travel to farms and pick up dead livestock, have more bedside personality than that piece of work. I rarely think of this event. I prefer to look at my chemo curly hair in the morning and remember that I’m still alive thanks to a port. Not to reflect on the unfortunate installation procedure.
Five months fill the space between the 4th of July two-week family vacation in Iowa and the five-day trip in December. Sixteen hundred miles from Boston’s Logan Airport to Iowa’s Cedar Rapids’ airport is long in distance and longer in time. By the time September rolls around, I’m missing home. When harvest season begins in October, photos of golden shelled corn and long horizon sunsets dot the internet. The sight of them lodges a lump in my throat. At my core, the farm where I grew up, held in the sway of the seasons, comforts me.
My breast to knee taping was completed in October of 2009; I didn’t go home for Christmas that year given that the port was put into action to fight breast cancer from October through April. The pandemic of 2020, as bizarre as the taping, also kept me from Iowa for Christmas. Perhaps it was 2009 when I tuned in extra early to Christmas music.
In December, my speakers light up with vocals—from Sinatra and Pentatonix to Brett Eldridge and Bublé. And like the months before, “Silent Night” pulls forth the memory of my dad’s voice in the evening as he sang the lyrics to us four little kids. “Up on the Rooftop” brings back the prickly feeling of the wool sweater I wore to my second grade elementary school Christmas concert. Then “Jingle Bells” puts me in the driver’s seat with my grandma next to me on a wintry night, driving around in town to look at lights on the last Christmas she was with us. These Christmas carols scoop the crème de le crème memories from childhood, and the distance between New England and the Midwest disappears.