It always overwhelms me to see this quiet victory of community. It's a reminder that Christmas is a symbol, a gesture. And gestures, while not always capable of changing the world, are essential to regirding our spirits. Whatever religious or secular beliefs we have about Christmas, we truly have to believe. If we don't, as Ernest Tubb once sang, Christmas is just another day.
Aside from gift giving, the holiday gesture more of us share than any other is music. It's caroling that the Grinch heard as he stood cold and alone on the mountain above Whoville. And it finally softened his cynical heart. The Christmas carols we choose to sing and to play also help fill us with the spirit. My favorites are those performances that express the unsatisfied yearnings for peace and community that, to me, are the holiday's true message: Bing Crosby crooning, "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas"; Sinatra, in "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," struggling to convince himself that "next year all our troubles will be miles away"; Elvis imagining a world where "Every Day Was Like Christmas." The best music of the season does something simple, yet very difficult: It lets us know that it actually believes in Christmas.
So believe it or not, I was expecting a lot from RuPaul's Christmas CD. The high-profile drag queen's other CDs have tended to play it straight, with undisguised gestures of goodwill toward man in the guise of catchy, thumping soul. That mix seemed a good bet to produce some earnest, not to mention house-raising, dance versions of Christmas classics. Instead, Ho Ho Ho mainly offers up a series of bad jokes -- such as the unclever "All I Want for Christmas (Is My Liposuction)" and a winking "Hard Candy Christmas" -- that mock the idea that the holidays mean anything at all. With the exception of a righteous cover of Little Steven's "All Alone on Christmas," RuPaul's effort fails because it doesn't believe in anything. (* 1/2)
This isn't to suggest that good Christmas music can't be funny; anyone who's ever heard Satchmo's hilarious "Zat You, Santa Claus?" knows that's not the case. Songs that make fun of the very idea of Christmas rarely hold up, but songs that have fun with the idea of Christmas are a different matter. For example, lyrics such as "We're rockin' in the manger, rockin' with the Prince of Peace" could easily come off as sacrilegious in the wrong hands, but on A Window Shopper's Christmas, 5 Chinese Brothers make them funny. They manage to pull this off by treating their admittedly silly idea not only as a punch line, but as the miracle it would actually be. Whether making you laugh ("Missing Miss December" is a "Pictures of Lily" for the holidays) or mist up (as with "Making Angels in the Sand"), the 13 tracks by these Baltimore-based roots-rockers comprise as fine a collection of original holiday tunes as I've heard in years. (****)
Often, the most important community message that Christmas offers is the very specific one of home and family, of a connection to the faith and idealism of our childhoods. For these nostalgic moments we rarely want originals; we want instead the carols we're familiar with. So it makes sense that the past several years have witnessed an increased flow of reissued Christmas classics, and this year is no different. The Spirit of Christmas, an encore of Ray Charles's fine 1986 effort, finds the Genius of Soul in big-band jazz mode on "What Child Is This" and kicking it in country-soul style for "The Little Drummer Boy." (***)
On Christmas with Chet Atkins, the Nashville guitar legend picks his way through sweet versions of Christmases both "white" and "blue," though a couple of the instrumentals sound a bit too much like incidental music for a Yuletide episode of The Beverly Hillbillies. (** 1/2).
Another country Christmas reissue, though, gets it exactly right. On the re-released 1961 classic Christmas with the Louvin Brothers, Charlie and Ira Louvin, siblings who normally sang of lonely broken hearts and tragic unsaved souls, unleash their devastating, true-believer harmonies on carols of salvation. On "Good Christian Men Rejoice" and the exceptional "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," the Louvins' gestures of religious faith are so confident, so certain, that they sound nothing short of blissful. (****)