THE DARKROOM: An Album Review and a Brief Ramble into My Past with Christmas Music

It wouldn't take much asking around on your part to find out that Christmas isn't my favorite holiday. Mel calls me a Scrooge and I take that with a grain of salt and move on. She means it with all the love you can pack into a word. Many might find this strange, no, not the witty words of one Sweet Melissa, for she is a wealth of those, but this strange dislike of Christmas. And it is not completely true because there are many aspects of the Yuletide Wonder that I love. I love the eggnog. I love the overwhelming excitement that builds as each day of December ends and blends into the next moving Christmas Day ever closer. I love buying things that people love, hiding them, and watching their faces light up as they open them up. I love not being able to sleep the night before and getting up (yes, still) when it is still dark outside and wondering if Santa has come. I love Christmas Day breakfast and lunch. I love going to look at Christmas lights, both the good kind, but even better are the ridiculous displays where it looked like Ole' St. Nick stashed his favorite Holiday Hoarder. And I love the ritual of gathering all the paper, bows, boxes, and bags and doing it ever so slowly trying to make sure no one's gift gets thrown in the fire. I love watching the flames as the colored paper causes it to flicker and turn odd colors. I love the smell of a real Christmas tree and the going to get it. I am humbled by the fact that the Maker of the Universe would send His only Son to lowly Earth knowing the ending and all for someone like me who is going to take it all for granted over and over. As you can see, I don't exactly dislike Christmas, but I guess the part I hate is when I stroll into Lowe's, Wal-Mart, Target, or Walgreens, in mid-October and I begin seeing the rise of Christmas items making their ugly presence known two and a half months early. Then Thanksgiving gets almost completely ignored as the infamous"Black Friday" sales become more and more absurd and the violence that goes with it becomes more and more unglued. And at times, I can't seem to get past the bad so that I can look at the good.

And this is where music comes into play. I actually like Christmas carols and the traditonal favorites sung by Frank, Bing, and Dean. But then when you add to the equation that everyone and their brother, uncle, pastor, dog, llama, chipmunk, cousin, choir, Jewish singer-songwriter, Jewish saxophonist, rap artist, and rock band has their version of the same 15 songs and radio stations begin playing them twenty-four hours a day beginning on what seems like September 1st each year, it is enough to make me go crazy. So, each year, I try to distance myself from the usual and find something that is truly new or at least feels real. Sometimes, an album will give me several years of use before a new one must be found. I listened to Jars of Clay's, Drummer Boy, for about 10 years before something new came around. When I got married, Mel introduced me to an album called, Your King Has Come, but it was already six years old when I got introduced to it. And the Jars of Clay put out, Christmas Songs, in 2007 and that has had to be it for me besides a classical guitar album my older brother gave me as a cd back in '97.

And this leads us to maybe my five-way tie for all-time favorite artist: Sufjan Stevens. I began listening to him on the back eating porch that we had lovingly dubbed "Schenectady at Alpine Camp for Boys and things (musically) haven't been the same for me. That was also the summer I began listening to Andrew Bird and wearing Chacos, so I guess we could say 2004 was the year many things changed for me. Sufjan put out a Christmas album in 2006, Songs for Christmas, and it consisted of 42 songs that were a good mixture of traditionals and originals. And it came in a really neat box set that came with all kinds of other goodies. Needless to say, I have been listening to these songs a lot since then; after December 1st, of course!

And now, this year, 2012, Sufjan has released another Christmas album, Silver and Gold. For the time being, I am willing to say it is even better than the first, Songs for Christmas. I say this for two reasons: 1) it contains 16 more songs 2) the song list contains many more originals and many songs that I've never heard before. The music variety is par for the course if you are used to listening to Mr. Stevens. He does not stray far from what we've come to know from him and I for one am glad of this. There are slow, soft tunes, then there are rowdy sing-alongs, and then there are the 15 minute songs that take you from slow reverence to techno chaos in the span of a quarter of an hour. Those songs are really something else.

However, as usual, I find it very hard to explain in words how exactly a Sufjan album sounds to me. So, I will try to explain it like this, the songs from, Silver and Gold, make me feel like I did when I was a little boy and Christmas was still something I looked forward to for so long and so hard that I would wake my tired parents at 4 AM in an effort to begin Christmas Day. Or it makes me feel like the little boy who would ride with his older brother as fast as their bikes would carry them to the end of Venetian Village with the cold wind burning their noses and lips in an effort to meet their grandparents and get to ride in the back of their truck home. It was almost as if they were bringing the whole of Christmas with them in the back of that old, muddy Ford F150. Or it makes me feel like the little boy who used to sit through the chaos of Christmas Mass waiting for the crowd to leave, so they could rush back to his grandparents house near the river, so that they could make the ritualistic trip around Roundtree Drive to look at Christmas lights so grandpa could change into the Santa suit and burst through the door and we could pretend for a brief moment that he was Santa and not a grandpa who smelled of boiled custard and scotch. These are how the songs make me feel. They dredge up the memories many Christmases past and they dangle them in front of me and I get to relive them.