This one’s going to require some context. Earlier this week I went to a 1994-themed writing event where among the prompts was one by the esteemed Nicole Haroutunian. The prompt involved using lyrics from a beloved song in a longer work. This is not the thing I wrote that night, but I gave it another shot a few days later. So here’s a strange little essay, written after a song I have a lot of feelings about, Frightened Rabbit’s “It’s Christmas So We’ll Stop.”

Words in bold are taken from the song itself.

***

For most of my life in listening, I’ve come to a given song or album or verse or chorus or verse in search of a specific feeling. I suppose it’s a constant tension: I want to let the past go but I also want to remember better times. I was going to say “simpler times,” but that doesn’t really get to the heart of things: sometimes the emotions I want to bring up aren’t positive or nostalgic. Sometimes, to borrow a lyric from Bacharach and Costello, I want him to hurt. (Him is me.) I don’t know if this speaks to the existence of some sort of rot within me or if this is something that nearly every listener goes through when they decide what they’re going to queue up next. 

Around Christmas this feeling is always especially pronounced. Most of the time I wish I could make it stop, but my subconscious has other plans. 

That maybe speaks to the paradox of Christmas music in my life. It’s really easy to go too deep into nostalgia around the holidays. You think, I’ll just take a step inside and see what’s here and the next thing you know you’re wondering why “Santa Baby” has been on repeat for the last two hours. 

As I get older I start to think more and more that the big questions I think I’ll have an answer to one day are actually questions I’ll never have an answer for, and maybe that’s okay, because no one actually has the answers for them. We’re just all trying to find that right balance between nostalgia and anticipation, only each of us has our own definition of what balance is good and which version is intolerable. 

And so we sit around our homes, large or small, red stockings by the fireplace and twinkling lights burned into our eyes and red cards everywhere, and we wait, whether it’s in our best suits or our ugliest sweaters. 

Some folklorist or historian might have a better sense of why people feel like this. Maybe it’s due to the time of the season and ancient animist rituals, or maybe it’s something everyone makes their own, as unique as each of the faces watching the tree at Rockefeller Center or in a town square or the courtyard of a bar in Long Island City. Will any of it matter, in the long run? It’s a fleeting kind of thing, the way the light will radiate and our eyes will gravitate to the shiny thing, like kids on Christmas morning. 
Maybe that’s all it comes down to. We want something to keep the cold away; we want some glimmer of hope that tomorrow will be better. And as much as we might want to hide from the horrors real or metaphorical of the moment, the right song can carry you along in its wake. The right song, jubilant or melancholy, can help you face tomorrow. And in some secular way, that seems to be about as universal a take on Christmas as you can get.