A few nights ago, on one of the increasingly rare occasions at my house when the television happened to be on, I noticed one of the networks was running one of the several versions of that ancient, cartoon feature, "A Charlie Brown Christmas," with its ageless characters and fossilized pratfalls.
I was immediately struck by the theme music, which I didn't remember ever having heard before (I had heard it, but didn't recall it). The words were all about "joy," "beauty," "cheer," and so forth, but the tone of the piece, sung by a boys' choir, was extremely sad, melancholy, pensive, and completely at odds with the images simultaneously taking place on the screen.
That aura of deep melancholy and sadness now infuses everything about this joyless season, from the post-Thanksgiving Day scuffles over deep-discount merchandise at Wal-Mart, to the sad, exhausted, and careworn faces of shoppers in the overcrowded stores, wearily fulfilling their obligation to exchange battery-operated items of useless junk with each other on the appointed day.
This is all that's left of one of the primary high holy days, as it's vestigally celebrated by the mummified remains of our dominant religion.
When you look at this sad celebration as it is, as it's evolved, it's kind of cool in a half-assed sort of way. It's a tired, played-out ritual embodying the last gasps of a dying culture.
As it turns out, I have that song on a CD -- the late Vince Guaraldi's "A Charlie Brown Christmas." I've listened to that song a lot the past few days. I enjoy the melancholy.
No comments:
Post a Comment