A Christmas Music Story: “Winter Song”

I’ve been collecting Christmas music for many years. Actually, it would be more accurate to say I used to collect Christmas music….

It really kicked into high gear when I met Kim and moved to Berkeley and discovered that Amoeba Music would put out all the Christmas albums people had traded in all year — which took up about a quarter of the store — and would sell most of them for $1. So I’d go every year, root through every single bin, and head home with a huge bag of new stuff, the more unusual, the better. I have just about every genre imaginable, everything from acid house to bluegrass, Celtic, jazz, klezmer, French, reggae, classical, Christian, pagan, heavy metal, Native American, children’s, novelty … you name any genre or nationality, chances are I’ve got at least one Christmas song in it.

I bought the novelty (and heavy metal) Christmas music for Kim. He hated Christmas music because he hated Christmas. I cannot put too fine a point on that: he HATED Christmas. (I also bought him a black tabletop Christmas tree that he liked … until I decorated it with ornaments in every color of the rainbow. Then, not so much. But that’s another story.) I would always start playing Christmas music on Thanksgiving and keep going all the way through to Epiphany (January 6th).

Although Epiphany is a Christian observance, something celebrated at church, playing Christmas music up to that date at home wasn’t a religious thing for me so much as something dating back to my childhood…

In my family, we celebrated The 12 Days Of Christmas. My brother and I had the usual presents from Santa on Christmas morning, then we’d all open our gifts under the tree on Christmas afternoon, but there were 24 presents under the tree that my brother and I weren’t allowed to open. These had our names on them and were numbered 1 through 12. Those were for the 12 Days Of Christmas. Each night after Christmas, we opened one present in the order they were numbered. These were small gifts, but still something fun that we wanted (like mine were usually things like bubble bath, a cute pair of socks, lip gloss, etc.). But the one for the 12th night was always something big. Not big like “Santa brought me a new bike!” big, but useful big like, “OMG, the powder blue suede coat with the fake fur collar I wanted!”

Kim put up with my incessant Christmas music playing because he knew it made me really happy. He would put on his best Scrooge face and joke good-naturedly, “Aaaargh, not CHRISTMAS music again!,” but even though he didn’t despise it enough to tear his ears off or run from the room screaming, I knew he didn’t LOVE it and was just sucking it up for my sake and I felt bad. So one year I went bananas on iTunes and hunted down every novelty song I could find. Most novelty Christmas songs seem to fall into one of four categories: 1) crude, 2) hating Christmas, 3) the misery of family drama at Christmas, or 4) unfortunate mishaps involving small creatures at Christmas (sometimes those small creatures being children). There was a sort of rare 5th category, the proverbial Holy Grail of Christmas novelty songs: songs that fell into all four of the categories, combined.

So I went nuts and bought about 100 stupid songs. It was insane.

I didn’t tell Kim I’d done this. He thought I was going to turn on Christmas music as usual. Two or three songs in, it hit him that these were not the usual Christmas crap. No, this was special Christmas crap. He loved it. I’ve just about never seen him so happy. So with the exception of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I played those songs exclusively when he was around.

Now I’m stuck with all those goofy songs and, rather than make me smile, they mostly just remind me that he’s not here. As if EVERYTHING doesn’t already remind me of that. I haven’t bought any Christmas music since he died. I listen to the stuff I already have, but the joy went out of looking for new stuff.

Anyway, I bought all the novelty stuff in December of 2008.

The following year, 2009, Christmas would turn out to be painful in two different ways, one that I was aware of at the time, another that I wouldn’t be aware of for six more months: it was my first Christmas without my mom and my last Christmas with Kim.

I was doing my usual new holiday music buying for myself, albeit half-heartedly. I was too depressed to go to Amoeba, so I bought everything on iTunes. One of the albums I found that year was The Hotel Café Presents Winter Songs with songs by a bunch of my favorite female singer/songwriter artists.

The first song on the album was “Winter Song” by two people I’d never heard of before, Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson. It floored me. I played it over and over and over for hours on end, crying for my mom. It doesn’t matter what time of year it is, I listen to it whenever I miss her, and whenever I hear it I instantly think of her. Now that I’ve lost Kim, too, it packs a double punch-to-the-gut. But I will always think of it first and foremost as “Mom’s song,” because every time I played it that first Christmas without her it called her to me, and without it I would have been even more of a wreck than I was.

More than anything, it asks the question I’ve been asking myself constantly since Kim died: “Is love alive in me?” I don’t know the answer. I don’t know if I ever will. But I always hope one day I’ll be able to answer yes.

[After the album version I’m also including a video of a live performance because it’s just so beautifully done.]

I miss you both more than I can ever say.