Have yourself a merry Xanax Christmas

We get two newspapers delivered to our home.  In case any Millenials are reading, I should explain that a "newspaper" is a non-digital medium for conveying news, human interest stories, obituaries and other items thought to interest the public.  The medium itself is a wood pulp product called "paper".  Newspapers were mainstream media a century or so ago, back in the olden days when people reasonably expected to pay a small amount of money for their newsfeeds, and journalists had both "professional standards" and "editors" to ensure that what was published was verifiably true rather than beholden to some profitability scheme or political stratagem.  A shrinking number of newspapers continue to be delivered to subscribers' homes once per day, kind of like when the UPS truck brings you the stuff you ordered from Amazon.





Sorry for that digression. One of those newspapers that plops onto the end of our driveway every morning is our local suburban newspaper, which I suppose would be considered a mid-size paper; it's on this top-100 circulation list, although not in the upper half.  It employs some reporters (fewer every year, I think), a good chunk of whom seem to be in the sports department.  The remaining content of the daily paper is filled out with material off of the AP wire (or however AP content gets delivered these days), as well as some content from some of its "alliance partners" or some such, which include the Chicago Sun-Times, the Washington Post and perhaps others.

The other newspaper we get is is the Chicago Tribune, which is in the top 10 of that circulation list I linked to in the previous paragraph.  The Tribune is still what I would expect newspaper aficionados would think of as a "real newspaper", although I am sure it is subject to the same market pressures that have killed off a ton of newspapers while, it seems to me, endangering the entire profession of journalism, to the detriment of our local communities and the Republic.  I have occasion from time to time, because of ministry things I do, about which I may post some time in the future, to talk with reporters in the local media.  And I can tell you that the archetype of the hard-boiled newspaper reporter, the guy or gal who has heard it all before, who checks it out before believing that her mother loves her, like those guys playing cards in the press room in "His Girl Friday", doesn't exist anymore at most of the news outlets around here.  Except the Chicago Tribune, and some of the larger television stations.  And even those ones aren't really hard boiled eggs; they're all polished and presentable, which I suppose is a requirement when even a print reporter may have to make a video of himself reporting the news to put up on the website.  But the other outlets are sending out reporters who are either fresh out of college, or (I wouldn't put this past corporations) low-paid or unpaid college interns.

Sorry, digressing again.  Depending on who is away at college or off doing other stuff in their lives, there are anywhere from three to six reasonably literate and curious persons in our household at any given time, with my wife and I comprising the older generation.  So it's a worrisome and disappointing thing to me that, in spite of an entire lifetime in this household of my wife and I setting the example of being regular newspaper readers, none of our kids reads newspapers.  Nothing - the comics, the Sudoku, the horoscopes - nothing about newspapers attracts them.  Kind of like church.  There are a lot of things changing in our society, and I fear some of them are not for the best, but which I'm more or less at a loss to explain.

Ok - striving to stay on topic here.  Two newspapers arrive daily, and two newspaper readers live here, so it has fallen out that I start with the local suburban newspaper each day, and my wife gets the Tribune.  She takes it into the office on days when she goes into the office, whereas I work from home every day, not having an office to go into (I am employed, but the idea that the people who work together all live in the same local area and congregate in a common workplace is yet another charming notion of the past, of a piece with buggy whips, newspapers and churches), so there are some days when I don't see the Tribune around the house.  When I do have time to look at it, I usually glance through the front section (if you're a Millenial and need an explanation for the concept of a "Section", leave a comment).

And so, finally, here is where I'm going with this.  The Chicago Tribune employs a columnist by the name of Mary Schmich.  And man oh man, can she write.  Because I don't see her newspaper every day, I don't come across her that often, but when I do, I can only say that she has yet to write anything that hasn't held my attention.  And if you don't think that's high praise for a newspaper columnist, I invite you to get to know my attention span better.

Schmich has written at least one well-known column.  About 20 years ago, she wrote this imaginary graduation speech.  To the extent that things were able to go viral in 1997, this one reportedly went viral - but at least in part because, in going viral, it was misattributed to Kurt Vonnegut. Schmich has written, interestingly, about that experience as well.

She wrote something that appeared in today's paper that I'd like to share with you.  But now that I've come all this way on this post, and am only now coming around to the point of it, I am only now remembering that Tribune content on the web may be behind a subscriber wall.  I hope this content is available to you somehow.

Point drawing closer now: Schmich's column that caught my interest earlier today is here, in case it's accessible to you.  It's about the well-known holiday-season song, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas".  If you've ever attended to the song's lyrics as commonly sung, you know that, even on its own merits, it's not completely treacly.  There is a sort of wistful, things-may-get-better-next-year quality to it.  And if you've ever seen the old film "Meet me in St. Louis", for which the song was written, and understand the context of the plot in which Judy Garland (who was a *great* singer) sings it to young Margaret O'Brien, you realize that it was written for a situation in which hearts are about to break - not only because of romance, but also because the stability of a family is so fragile and vulnerable.   Fathers uproot families and move them to another city.  Kids grow up and leave the nest.  Sons go off to war and get shot up or blown to bits.  Parents divorce.  Mental illness sets in.  Someone has a health problem and the family goes broke.  There are a thousand ways that a stable, loving family can slip away from us.  If you tell me that "Meet Me in St. Louis" is a treacly-nostalgic movie, I won't dispute it, but I'll also argue that it has a heart.

Schmich's column reports that, as we often hear it sung today, the song is quite altered from its original conception.  One line that appears in many recordings, "Hang a shining star upon the highest bough", which frequently is seized upon and belted out by today's power balladeers as though it's the emotional core of the whole piece, wasn't even in the film; Schmich notes that Frank Sinatra considered Garland's version too dark and depressing for the presumably-treacly Christmas record he was recording, so he insisted that the line, "Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow" be rewritten.

But Schmich writes that even the lyrics that were sung in the Garland film had been sanitized from the original provided by the lyricist, Hugh Martin.  That version opened:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas / It may be your last / Next year we may all be living in the past

This was in 1944.  The country was at war, and even though by then it was going well, the casualties were high, and surely it was taking a toll on the psyches of Americans.  It isn't difficult to imagine that the world's events cast a shadow, and somehow that cloud may have crept into Martin's lyric (this is my speculation, not Schmich's).  Garland thought it was too dark and asked that it be altered.

I suspect Garland's instincts were right in this instance.  But we may ask, why did those instincts lead her from depression to hope?  She must have intuited something about the American public during a difficult period.  Perhaps that's not surprising; by 1944 she was a money box office draw, and may have known how to read the pulse of the movie-going/record-buying/sheet-music-purchasing public.

All of these factors: music, treacle, family, nostalgia, and perhaps clouds and depression, are part of the amalgam that makes for our understanding of the Christmas holiday.  It's a time to be with family, but being with a family can be complicated.  It is complicated for our family when we get together with the relatives.  It's something we look forward to, but there is also an element of getting through it.

And somewhere, buried beneath all these layers of emotion and family history and popular culture, is the longing for security and stability in a world in which the ground seems to be shifting under our feet, every day a new earthquake or aftershock, with the end of it difficult to foresee.  This is the world into which we welcome the Christ child.  Maybe he is hope we can latch onto.