Christmas: what does it remind you of?
The festive season is a time to pause and reflect. It plunges people into deeper reflection. Nostalgia takes over. My dad was “The Small One”. He left us on 24 December and I like to write to let out what’s buried. That’s what I do every year.
Here is my personal Christmas note.
This morning I thought about the times when music was the order of the day. I’m not talking about those evenings filled with Jingle Bells and other popular refrains playing on the old people’s sound system, but of those gatherings at Aunt Fernande’s: my two uncles on the violin and accordion; Aunt Diane on the piano; and enthroned in the centre, with her magnificent soprano voice, my dear mum.
Times are changing. For many baby-boomers, the magic of yesteryear ceased to operate when Quebec began to fly with Charlebois’s Lindberg and La Forestier’s high cries. I was thirteen in 1968.
As young adults, we start dreaming vicariously of Christmases past, and it’s our turn to create magical memories for our children.
In 1982, Ingmar Bergman, the man who had already set the Laterna magica alight, understood this, and his masterpiece, Fanny and Alexander, still fills the imagination, because it wasn’tjust the wonderful Christmas party with Héléna Ekdahl, son, wife, children, maids and actors from the family theatre. Above all,
there was the darker, initiatory continuation of the exile with the man of God, before the return of joy, enabling ten-year-old Alexandre to commune with the invisible and discover his divine essence.
That same year, Le père Noel est une ordure (1982) was released with little fanfare. Fans of Christmas films that aren’t for children had a good laugh, but perhaps a yellow one, like the French couple who, some fifteen years later, exchanged the most vicious remarks in Arnaud Desplechin’s Un conte de Noël (2008).
In the meantime, my dad had retired, but he had never lost the Christmas spirit. He had written “The Smallone” for his children and grandchildren, recounting the memories of a five-year-old boy who had seen Father Christmas in 1934, but we didn’t yet know that it would be his greatest Christmas present.
Dad was to leave us on 24 December. More than ten years already: “May his soul be woven into the threads of our lives”, as the Kaddish teaches. December 24th came around again, and when I got up, there was an email from my dear cousin telling me that Aunt Fernande had died in her sleep.
As much as I still love Brahms, I’m not going to fall asleep tonight listening to his famous lullaby. It would take me straight back to my childhood and the magic of that musical box that has been swept away into the night of oblivion. I’d rather listen to the first Trio for piano, violin and cello, composed by Brahms when he was twenty and revised more than forty years later: it’s “the beautiful, uncertain revelation of a youthful impulse rewritten in scars, even sobs” (Gil Pressnitzer).
Today I’m 67.
Happy holidays!
© Luc Martineau 2022
©Luc Martineau 2022
