“What’s Christmas without music?”

By

Gerry Niskern

What would the Christmas season be without music? The majestic choirs singing Ava Maria and the beautiful music of the Nutcracker performed during the holidays are a special gift to all of us every year.

Actually, my earliest memory of Christmas music was not the traditional songs of the season. I remember going to my Grandma’s house every year, on January 7^th, the Catholic Orthodox Christmas.  I walked between my mom and dad over crunchy snow that smelled of cinders.  Although Santa visited our house on the 25^th, I couldn’t wait to celebrate “Grandma’s Christmas” with my aunts, uncles and cousins.  Polka music spilled through the kitchen door from my Uncle Paul’s accordion. After dinner we danced the night away as the old frame house shook with pounding feet.

We sang “Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Away in a Manger and O Little Town of Bethlehem” in the country church I attended as a child back East. The peaceful strains of “Silent Night” carried over the snowy hills at our Christmas Eve service.

After we moved to Phoenix, the same melody came back to my Girl Scout troop on a chilly December morning in l943, during WWII.

As our troop cooked our pancakes over an open fire in Papago Park, we sang Christmas carols. Just as we finished Silent Night, we heard the same melody, a German carol “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht”……echoing back to us by strong male voices. The chorus was coming from Hole in the Rock where some German POWs and their guards were resting after working in the park. We listened in awe. I think that’s when we  realized how small the world really is.

As soon as the war was over and gasoline was available again our family made a long awaited journey back to West Virginia for Christmas.  “How’d you like to spend Christmas on Christmas Island” played often as I took spins around the skating rink with my teenage cousins. On the long car trip back home to Arizona we listened  to “ Frosty the Snowman” and “The Old Lamplighter” over and over again on the car radio.  It was 4 degrees above zero as my Dad maneuvered the old Plymouth over icy roads lined with overturned vehicles lying in snow banks all the way across Texas.

“Jingle Bells” is one of the first songs our own kids learned. Then when the holidays got a little more hectic we turned to, “Santa Claus is coming to town…..he knows if you’ve been bad or good”. Those words used to scare me as a child but they didn’t faze my kids.

Then there were the years the kids inundated us with “All I want to Christmas is My Two Front Teeth, Grandma go Run Over by a Reindeer, and “I’m Getting Nuttin’ for Christmas”.

One song that evolved into books, movies and more was “Rudolph the Red-nosed Raindeer”. It caught everyone’s fancy, especially our grandkids. Our home on the mountain looks

over the city lights. When the red light on our oven reflected back on the living room window out

into the sky, they were sure they were seeing Rudolph. I didn’t have the heart to tell them otherwise.

Men who have served in every war since l942 remember listening to Bing Crosby sing “White Christmas” and dreaming of being reunited with their family soon.

I don’t know what Christmas song our men and women stationed in the Middle East like best, but according to the Federal Chaplaincy Ministries “I’ll be home for Christmas” is heard over and over again.