Fishing - A Merry Christmas

Cyli wrote:
The one Christmas song that always gets me is the one with the line,
"I'll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams..." Brings that
bittersweet thing on. There's always a war someplace that was
supposed to be over by Christmas.

There's always someone down at the fire station working on the eve and
the day. There are cops and doctors and infrastructure repair people
out there.

But it's the soldier aspect that gets me every time.

I think it was a Bing Crosby song.

At the risk of offending Tatosian's masculine sensibilities:

The stuff of dreams: Karen Carpenter's voice

By Chris Jones
Tribune arts critic

December 18, 2006

The other frigid night, I sat alone on the snowy street outside my house
listening to Karen Carpenter sing "I'll be Home for Christmas" on my car
radio.

I love that voice.

It hit notes with such surety. Its evocative lower register had a
richness that no female pop singer ever has matched. But most important
of all, it was such a guileless instrument.

Carpenter sang without attitude -- but also without excessive sentiment.
In other words, her voice was at once incredibly beautiful and
strikingly neutral.

Even when her brother's oft-cheesy arrangements and harmonizing fought
hard against her honesty, Carpenter's singing always allowed for the
transference of longing and desire.

And that's exactly what "I'll be Home for Christmas," my favorite song
from this time of year, requires. First recorded in 1943 by Bing Crosby
with the John Scott Trotter Orchestra, the lyrics first were intended as
a kind of war-time fantasy, as if dreamed by a soldier stuck overseas
and dreaming of home and hearth. The ultimate line of the song, after
all, is a sad one: "If only in my dreams."

As with her other Christmas recordings, Carpenter's version was
infinitely more complex.

Listen to her sing this Christmas ballad and you can hear a weary
business traveler shoving past delays at O'Hare. You can sense a mother
rushing back to her kids who count on her. And you can detect a lover
desperate for a warm bed with someone in it.

All at once.

And although it's been nearly 25 years since Carpenter's death (at the
age of 32), the recording will forever come with a certain sadness.
Sometimes, it can feel like she's singing about a home where someone is
missing for good.

Frankly, the impact of the song all depends on one's mood of the moment
-- and at what point the listener is in their life. That was Carpenter's
brilliance -- that coupling of certitude and pliability, that unique
combination of eroticism and maternal comfort.

This is a song that revolves around a promise. And Carpenter's voice had
the unmistakable sound of one who always kept her promises.

When I was single and lonely, this singer and this Christmas song evoked
the home I wanted and the person I wanted in it with me. Now she -- and
it -- make me think about the nature of my home and its place in my
priorities. The world of the song is both a confirmation of what we
have, and yet, given the frantic way life goes at this time of year,
also an elusive dream.

----------

Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune