I’m probably not celebrating Christmas anywhere but on Ethics Alarms this year. Last Christmas was truly awful in every way, with my wife Grace in pain and suffering from some creeping malady that killed her in February  and that I was too blind to detect (and so were her doctors). We were also in our worst financial crunch in 25 years of running our ethics business, my son was having personal problems, and all was definitely not happy and bright.

I am certainly conflicted about the holiday this year. I am a passionate Christmas booster, as long-time readers here know, because I regard the secular holiday as a vital social balm as well as an ethics catalyst. It is a unique holiday that calls on us to be kind, generous and forgiving, and, if possible (I’m trying!) to just be happy for life and its wonders. I am not religious, but I do believe that this is a profoundly ethical time of year. We all need Christmas, frankly. I need it, even though I dread every minute of it this year.

One of the special features of Christmas is that it is soaked with nostalgia and traditions along with bittersweet memories of people and events long past. Charles Dickens got this aspect of the holiday exactly right; it is why I love “A Christmas Carol” so much and have so often participated in public presentations of the story. My last professional directing gig was a staged reading of it, and that was the fourth time I have overseen one; I also have organized and directed three mass “radio” readings, using conference call technology and the sound effects wizardry of Keith Bell. (Where is Keith these days? See, there’s another memory knocking!).

With The American Century Theater, I co-wrote and presented two Christmas musical revues: “If Only In My Dreams,” which centered on the letters GIs wrote home at Christmastime during World War II, and “An American Century Christmas,” a salute to the old-fashioned TV Christmas specials and perennial Christmas movies like the three that have Ethics Alarms “guides’ here: “It’s A Wonderful Life,” which I posted at Thanksgiving, “White Christmas,” which will be updated and posted soon, and on Christmas Eve this year, “Miracle on 34th Street.” The first revue was more popular, but the second was my favorite, because it was generated entirely by my own warm memories of what Christmas was like for me and my sister growing up in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Both of our parents were Depression kids in poor families and their Christmases were spare at best, so both were determined to make the holiday magical for their children. And it was. We would decorate the tree carefully and lovingly a week before the 25th—I remember my mother insisting that each strand of genuine tin tinsel saved for years be placed individually on the branches—and go to bed after hanging our (huge) stockings with visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads. When we got up on Christmas morning, my parents had meticulous constructed a “Christmas panorama,” with the giant stockings stuffed with gadgets, oranges, walnuts and small packages lying by the fireplace, and the whole living room covered with presents, mine on the left of the living room, my sister’s on the right. The gifts were mostly unwrapped, and the vista was ever spectacular.

My father, a photography fanatic who was terrible at his hobby, had the old home movie projector spotlights blazing. He would record Edith and I coming down the stairs to see the amazing treasure left by Santa as mom looked on beaming and eager to see our reactions. My parents insisted on going through this ritual even after we were in college! My mother wouldn’t let the tradition go.

In 1963, the week before Christmas, Bing Crosby hosted “The Hollywood Palace,” a live variety show that was always headed by some entertainment legend, though Bing had the honor more than anyone else. That week he introduced a new Christmas song, the last popular Christmas song to have an unambiguous religious context. That was “Do You Hear What I Hear?,” and the video above was what I saw live. Something in the song immediately resonated with me; I was always a Bing Crosby fan, following the guidance of my father, but I loved everything about the new song despite its childlike simplicity. I said so immediately following Bing’s rendition. Sure enough, the song was playing on our old Magnavox stereo when my sister and I came down the stairs in our pajamas on Christmas morning.

“Do You Hear What I Hear?,” Bing’s version of course though there have been hundreds of covers, is the first Christmas song I play every year as soon as whiffs of holly, evergreens and mistletoe are in the air. It throws my mind back to those magical Christmases that Grace and I tried to recreate for our son every year while he was growing up. That magic was significantly dimmed when my father died, in his sleep, on my birthday in 2009, leading to the saddest Marshall Christmas. The spirit fell away a bit more the next year, when my mother, who never got over losing the love of her life after 58 years of marriage, was in the hospital fighting a voracious hospital infestion that killed her two months later. Christmas was never the same after Mom died: it was her joy and obsession. Still Christmas reminds me of her, and Dad, and that lost magic…and Bing.

I was pondering when and whether to put up a post about “Do You Here What I Hear?” this year when I checked out Ann Althouse’s blog and discovered that she had posted the video as a joke after her post about Jill Biden getting a laugh at her Christmas comments wishing the assembled “joy.” Apparently some took her choice of words as a sly swipe at Kamala Harris’s ill-fated “joy” theme.

In the comments to the post, some wags made jokes about how  the shepherd boy tells the king to bring the “child shivering in the cold” silver and gold when what the baby needed was a blanket or a space heater. Yeah, good one: they made those jokes in 1963. Some jackass wrote, “If you listen to the lyrics, “Do You Hear What I Hear” ranks right up there with “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” for supposedly secular seasonal songs with aggressively creepy quasi-Christian imagery applied to Progressive pieties.”

Oh, bite me. The song was never intended to be “secular” and how it can be heard as “anti-Christian” is beyond me. And Bing: he was a devout Catholic, and one of the reasons Crosby became the voice of Christmas is that he sang Christmas music with such reverence and conviction. (The other reason was that he had that amazing, rich, expressive voice.).

It is especially perverse to impugn the lyrics of a Christmas song written by a man with the first name “Noël.”  “Do You Hear What I Hear” was written in October of 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, by a married songwriting team that wondered at the time if it would be the last thing they ever did. Regney, the lyricist, was born in France and had studied music at the Strasbourg Conservatory and at the Conservatoire National de Paris. When France was overwhelmed by Hitler’s troops in 1940, he was conscripted into the German army. As a Nazi soldier, Noël secretly joined the French underground and served as a spy, passing information along to the resistance. Once he led German soldiers into a trap where they were massacred by French fighters who cut them down in a crossfire. Regney was shot too, but survived.  He then deserted and worked with the French underground until the end of the war. Continue reading →