The Sounds of Christmas
By: Julia E Hubbel
Tags: Christnmas, Life Lessons, Life, Holidays, Joy

The Sounds of Christmas

Maybe not what you were thinking, still…

The joyous dance blasted out of my car radio, nearly blasting me out of my seat. I couldn’t help it. Tears sprang to my eyes and I clapped my hands so hard they stung.

Not a good idea, while driving 70 mph in the freezing rain. But still. I couldn’t resist.

I was listening to Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours,” music you might more likely associate with Disney’s first music video from the first Fantasia, released on November 13th, 1940. NPR was doing a segment on how this particular piece had inspired a woman far younger than I to revisit it during this year’s pandemic. Then WBUR’s Robin Young mentioned something I haven’t thought about for fifty-seven years: The version which locked one easily- recognizable theme into pop culture in 1963.

Some of the music from Hours had been lifted with joyous disrespect by the immensely talented and gone-too-soon Alan Sherman. Remember Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah? Yeah. Dance of the Hours. Both pieces are available here:

I was all of ten when my parents received Sherman’s album My Son the Nut, which I played until my parents hid the vinyl. I haven’t heard it in decades. It’s easy to forget that music that introduced so many of us to lovely chords didn’t have cartoon characters when it was created. However, it was visually engaging just the same, even if those audiences in Ponchielli’s time weren’t treated to this:

I was listening to classical music, a growing up gift from my parents, as long as I can remember. The cartoons of the time stole plenty of themes as background music, and I knew the William Tell overture long before The Lone Ranger forever crystallized the theme for my generation. I also recognized the scary themes from this visually lush version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Paul Dukas:

This is all Christmas music to me, recalling my parents’ love of the great composers, the gift to their kids of an equal passion for such gorgeous and visually enticing themes even if they were purely in our minds before the Disney wizards brought them to life.

Christmas music is so much more vast, especially if you have international roots and tastes. These are just a few of mine, and they created a cocoon of memories for my drive home, a car crammed full of gifts for my almost finished house.

At 67, I am spending my first Christmas in my new house. I am hugging my beloved friends by phone. Eating at my kitchen island by myself. All of which is just fine. I couldn’t be more fortunate, with good friends, a home to call my own. I could want for a tree and presents. But that would be miserly. As The Muppets Christmas Carol plays in the background, I already got my gifts this year in the form of new friends off Medium. They came gift-wrapped.

My Fantasia movies are somewhere in a box somewhere in this house. They were a beloved Christmas tradition. And believe me, a very welcome respite from the same twenty songs that current radio stations play ad infinitum, ad nauseum 24/7. The memory-filled blast of Ponchielli’s work was such a gift, and brought back the Florida farm living room where I, too, pretended to wear a tutu. And dreamed of Big Things.

Photo by Lionello DelPiccolo on Unsplash

One of the great lessons of age is to appreciate not only what we have, but also what smells, sights and sounds lift out of our past, served up like the best possible of all Christmas gifts: beloved memories.

However you are spending these few days as we bid 2020 an eagerly awaited adieu, and yearn to invite a new year with different potentials for all of us, I hope you are similarly gifted with treasures from Christmases past. Whether you get them from tasting a bowl of Risgrøt, red pork tamales, Hungarian Bejgli, doesn’t matter. I hope you drink deeply of the sights and sounds and smells, and in every way I hope they cause you to clap your hands until they sting.

Just don’t try driving while you do it.