Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (Revised)

[Author's note: I often make small revisions to posts after I have published them to this blog without calling attention to the fact. But the revisions I have made to this post are fairly radical, so I wanted to call my reader(s)' attention to them. After the original posting, I felt increasingly uncomfortable with parts of the post, because I was afraid they sounded sappy and phony. So I've changed those parts. Additions are underlined, like this. Deletions are stricken out, like this. I'm still not happy with the post, because there's an emotional statement that I was trying to make that is now gone. But until I have time to make that statement in a way that sounds less sappy, it's best that I keep it to myself. Maybe I'll try again next Christmas.]

According to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, is the ninth-most popular Christmas song so far this year. Recordings of the song by various artists were played on the radio 38,395 times between October 1 and November 28. Unfortunately, data are not available to show how many times each of the two versions of the song’s lyrics was played.

You may not have known there were two versions; you hardly ever hear but one of them nowadays.

The most popular version—the one you hear 99% of the time—goes like this:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.

Let your heart be light.

From now on, our troubles will be out of sight.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.

Make the yuletide gay.

From now on, our troubles will be miles away.

Here we are as in olden days,

Happy golden days of yore,

Faithful friends who are dear to us

Gather near to us once more.

Through the years we all will be together,

If the fates allow.

Hang a shining star upon the highest bough.

And have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

A few years ago, I was only vaguely aware that there might be two versions of the song. I remembered hearing something about "muddling through" in the lyrics of the song, but I heard them only every once in awhile. I didn’t give the matter much thought except to think that those were unusual words for a Christmas song. Then I heard the song played one December night on the radio, and the announcer referred to it as the “original version recorded in the 1940’s.” Everything then fell into place for me. The 1940’s! I’ll bet it was during the war, I thought. A quick internet search confirmed my hunch.

The first recording of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” sung by Judy Garland, was released by Decca records in 1944. These were the lyrics:  Think of what it must have been like for Americans that Christmas. Gasoline, rubber, nylon, shoes and other essentials were being rationed because the war effort needed them. People had planted “victory gardens” in their backyards to grow their own food. They were conducting paper and scrap-metal drives and buying war bonds. All across the country, families had husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers in combat theaters “somewhere in the Pacific” or “somewhere in Europe.” (That’s all the military censors would allow the servicemen to say about their locations in the letters they sent back home.) From October through December of that year, for example, General MacArthur's army was fighting the Battle of Leyte in the Philippines, and in Leyte Gulf the navy fought what some say was the greatest battle in naval history. Allied troops were fighting their way across Europe, and beginning in mid-December many were fighting desperately in the snow to repulse the German counteroffensive in the Battle of the Bulge. And whether servicemen's families celebrating Christmas back home in 1944 said it out loud or not, they worried they might never see their loved ones again. They dreaded the knock on the door from the Western Union boy, and of course, many had already received that life-changing telegram from the War Department.

Here are the words that Judy Garland sang that Christmas:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.
Let your heart be light.
Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.
Make the yuletide gay.
Next year all our troubles will be miles away.

Once again as in olden days,
Happy golden days of yore,
Faithful friends who were dear to us
Will be near to us once more.

Someday soon we all will be together,
If the fates allow.
Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow.

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

I understand (I’m getting much of this from Wikipedia by the way--credit where it's due) that Judy Garland’s recording was a wartime favorite among American servicemen. And this original version of the lyrics was recorded by a few other singers as well. But things changed in 1957 when Frank Sinatra prevailed upon the composer to change the words of the song so that Sinatra could include a less bittersweet version in his album, A Jolly Christmas. Hugh Martin accommodated Sinatra by writing a jollier set of lyrics. He changed the song's future-looking point of view--"next year" and "someday soon"--and replaced it with "from now on." And most tellingly, he deleted the muddling-through and in its place hung a shining star upon the highest bough. But the title remained the same, which presents something of an anomaly. If things in the Sinatra version are so hunky-dory now and will be from now on, why is it still just a  merry little Christmas?

The shining-star version has since been recorded many, many times by many, many singers (including Judy Garland, herself). It’s pretty much all you hear nowadays (although James Taylor, bless his heart, did record the muddling-through version on his 2006 CD James Taylor at Christmas).

I much prefer the muddling-through version to the shining-star version, and it’s a shame we hardly ever hear it. Its lyrics fit the scaled-down, subdued, merry little Christmas of the song's title much better than the shinging-star version does. And it's more realistic. We’re bombarded with fru-fru, secular Christmas songs that pretend that the problems that were challenging us during the first eleven months of the year magically disappeared the day after Thanksgiving. But we all know in our hearts that it doesn't work like that.

To my way of thinking, we still need the original version of the song, because there’s still plenty of muddling-through to be done at Christmas. I guess there always will be. Take war, for example. By my rough count, there have been 22 Christmases since 1944 when Americans were serving in combat zones. (It’s a rough count, because it’s hard to keep up with the dates that some wars start and stop, as you know.) That's twenty-two Christmases when there were American families uncertain that their loved ones would return home alive--and were muddling through the best they could in the meantime.

And there are plenty of other reasons besides having a family member deployed in a war zone why a person or a family might find themselves muddling through a Christmas and hoping that things will be better next year: illness; unemployment; recent divorce; a recent death that has shaken a family’s very foundation. Under such circumstances, it will take quiet heroism for the folks involved to make Christmas merry, and if they achieve a merry Christmas at all it is likely to be a little one.

My family is doing just fine this Christmas, and I hope yours is, too. But that could all change in a heartbeat. Or with a telephone call. Or with the delivery of a pink slip. If we are not among the ranks of the muddling-through today, we could be tomorrow. It seems to me that it isn’t asking too much to have at least one Christmas song for people who are just trying to muddle through.


So I’ll close by offering this modest Christmas wish to you and yours: Someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow. Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow. So have yourself a merry little Christmas, now.

Turns out there really was a Casey Jones

My local newspaper has a little daily feature that lists a few events that happened on this date in history. Today I read about the death of John Luther "Casey" Jones, the railroad engineer, who died on this day in 1900. Wikipedia and the Casey Jones Village website (http://www.caseyjones.com/) tell me the following about Casey Jones:

He was a train engineer for the Illinois Central. He was from Cayce, Kentucky, hence the nickname "Casey." He prided himself on keeping  his train on schedule or, in trainman's vernacular, "getting her there on the advertised" and never "falling down" (arriving late). Some say he had a tendency to take chances to meet that goal, but he was talented, and his peers considered him one of the best in the business.

Jones had a special train whistle. Its unique sound involved a long-drawn-out note that began softly, rose and then died away to a whisper, a sound which became his trademark. Some described its sound as "a sort of whippoorwill call," and people asleep in their beds along his route would hear it as he went by late at night and wake momentarily, saying, "There goes Casey Jones.”

On the night of April 29, 1900, he had just completed a run from Canton, Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee and would normally have laid over in Memphis.  But the regular engineer who would have had the Memphis-to-Canton run  called in sick, and so Jones was assigned the run (nicknamed "the Cannonball Express"). The weather was rainy and foggy, and the Memphis-to-Canton run was known for tricky curves. The change in engineers delayed the start of the run by 95 minutes, and although the run would normally take 4 hours and 50 minutes, Jones was determined to make up the 95-minute delay and "get her there on the advertised." The train left the station at 12:50 a.m., April 30.

He almost made up the entire 95-minute delay. By the time he was 155 miles into the 188-mile run, he was almost on time and was feeling chipper. He told his fireman,"the old girl's got her dancing slippers on tonight!" By the time he reached Vaughn, Mississippi, he was only two minutes behind.

But ahead around a bend there were two freight trains stopped on a side track with several cars extending out onto the main line. They were preparing to perform a maneuver called a "saw-by" to allow the Cannonball Express to pass, when an air hose broke and immobilized one of the freight trains, leaving the cars on the main line. Jones' fireman was in a position to spot the trouble first and yelled, "Oh my Lord, there's something on the main line!" Jones yelled to the fireman to jump. The fireman jumped from the speeding train and was knocked unconscious, but Jones stayed at the controls to try to reduce the train's speed. He reversed the throttle, applied the emergency air brakes, and succeeded in reducing speed from about 75 miles an hour to 35 before the train plowed into a wooden caboose, a car load of hay, a car full of corn and half way through a car of timber before leaving the track. Jones died in the crash, but none of his passengers were seriously injured, nor was the fireman who had jumped from the train. It's pretty clear that Jones' decision to stay on the train and do what he could to slow it down saved the lives of the passengers.

An African-American engine-wiper for the Illinois Central, Wallace Saunders, was a friend of  Jones and composed a ballad about him that caught on and has been recorded many times in various versions. The poet Carl Sandburg called "Casey Jones, the Brave Engineer" the "greatest ballad ever written." For his part, Wallace Saunders called Carl Sandburg "the greatest poet in the history of the world." (Just kidding.)

The Grateful Dead recorded the ballad but also did a spin-off entitled simply "Casey Jones." It's a lot more catchy to my ear than the ballad, but it also defames poor Casey with these lines:
 
Driving that train
High on cocaine
Casey Jones, you better
Watch your speed.
 
Jones was a teetotaler and devoted family man, and there is no evidence that he used cocaine. That's just The Grateful Dead being The Grateful Dead. The posthumous warning to "watch your speed," however, probably has some merit.
 
For years after the train crash that killed Jones, corn grew wild at the site--generations descended from the load of corn that was scattered from the freight train when the locomotive plowed into it.

John Luther "Casey" Jones
March 14, 1863--April 30, 1900

Remembering Margaret Hamilton

For some years now I've felt some affection for the memory of Margaret Hamilton. I'm not sure why.

You probably don’t recognize the name. She was a character actress who was very active in film and theater during the '30’s and '40’s. I can give you a hint to help you picture her, but the hint is so broad that it’s much more than a hint; it’s the answer. One of her movie lines was ranked 99th in the 2005 American Film Institute survey of the most memorable movie quotes: “I'll get you, my pretty . . . and your little dog, too!"

She wasn’t the producer’s first choice for the role of Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. (By the way, credit’s where it’s due: I’m getting most of this from Wikipedia.) Some pretty actress whom I’ve never heard of (Gale Sondergaard) turned down the role, because she was unwilling to allow herself to be made up to appear ugly. (That’s what vanity will get you.) Hamilton, never having been burdened with good looks, took the part, nailed it cold, and made it a part of movie history. It’s now hard to imagine anyone else in the role.

Selling the Wicked Witch of the West

As scary as the Wicked Witch was in the movie, she apparently could have been scarier. The studio executives cut some of her more wicked scenes for fear of scaring children in the movie audience. (Wouldn’t you like to see those cut scenes?) Many years later, she did a reprise of her role as the Wicked Witch on Sesame Street in an episode about fear. Apparently, she did her job too well, because it scared the bejeebers out of the kids in TV land, and the complaints from their parents persuaded the Sesame Street executives to never air that episode again.

Apparently, Hamilton was cast against type when she was cast as the witch, because in real life she was apparently very loving and friendly toward children. She had been a kindergarten teacher before making a career of acting. She sat on the Beverly Hills Board of Education in the '50’s and was also a Sunday school teacher. She appeared as herself on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood in the mid-70’s to show children how makeup could make a person look scary but that it was just make-believe.

In the '60’s, she was a regular in the soap opera The Secret Storm; in the early '70’s, she was a regular in the cast of As the World Turns. She continued acting until just a few years before her death in 1985. Her last acting job was a guest appearance as a veteran reporter on The Lou Grant Show.

Sometime in the '70’s, while I was in college, I saw a commercial on TV in which a kindly, elderly lady was promoting some brand of coffee. “That’s the Wicked Witch of the West!” I exclaimed. Whoever I said it to was skeptical, and I had no way to confirm it. Until now. Wikipedia tells us that Ms. Hamilton made a series of commercials for Maxwell House coffee during the '70’s, in which she played the part of Cora, the owner of a general store, who thought highly of Maxwell House.

Selling coffee

But she’ll always be a witch to me.

(And am I the only one who feels a twinge of pity for her near the end of the movie when she’s melting? When she’s shrunk down to nothing but a steaming pile of witch's clothes and while she’s barely moving what used to be her arms and her voice is growing more and more faint, her last words are, “What a world, what a world.” Kind of makes me sad.)

So here's to Margaret Hamilton--such a good wicked witch. To borrow from the lyrics of one of the songs in the movie: she was a whiz of a witch, if ever a witch there was.

Our Tent is a Very, Very, Very Fine Tent

Santa Claus left our family a Big Agnes Flying Diamond 8 tent for Christmas. It was the largest tent I could find at REI. I think it’s the largest tent you can buy without a circus license.

I chose such a big tent on the theory that the bigger the tent, the more comfortable my children were likely to be in it, and the more comfortable they were, the more pleasant they would find the camping experience. And the more pleasant they found the first camping trip, the more likely they would be to go on another. If it doesn't work out that way, I guess I'll have a very large, lightly used tent for sale.

It wasn’t that way with me when I was a kid. I was drawn to camping and didn’t worry too much about getting rained on or bitten by mosquitoes. When my father and my uncle took my cousin, my brother, and me camping on the Sabine River, we didn’t have a tent at all. My father and my uncle would string up a flimsy tarp of polyethylene that my father got for free at the DuPont plant where he worked, and we huddled beneath it when the rains came. We didn’t mind.

But back to our new tent. I think it’s the biggest tent I’ve ever seen. It’s long and wide, and at its tallest point I can stand up straight without my head touching the top. It has two doors—a front and a back—and a zip-up curtain that allows you to separate the tent into two rooms (or to tie it back out of the way if you don’t want to). I figured that as my daughters get older and become more modest, they will appreciate having a room of their own or at least a separate dressing area. And since the separate area has its own entrance through the back door, they can even act like their parents aren’t there. That will come in handy when they reach the age where our presence embarrasses them. They can pretend they have a completely separate address in the campground, as though they lived in a ripstop nylon duplex.

The tent is so large that I’m having some buyer’s remorse, because I’m afraid it may be too big for the space allotted in most car-camping spaces in state and national parks. I guess I’ll find out. I’m not going to try to send it back at this point, given what I put it through last night. What’s done is done.

The “8” in the name of the tent means it can sleep eight people. It doesn’t mean it can sleep eight people comfortably, however. Fortunately for tent-shoppers, companies like Big Agnes provide a diagram showing how the claimed number of sleepers would actually fit in a particular model of tent, so no one is misled. Those diagrams always remind me of wasp larvae in their nest. When I was a boy, I once took apart a wasp nest to see what was inside. The wasp larvae were white grubs with the beginnings of wings. Each larva was nestled inside its own little cell, which was topped with a white paper cap. Looking back on it, I’m sorry I took apart the wasp nest and aborted those would-be wasps. But what’s done is done.

Back to our tent. Here’s the schematic diagram supplied by the Big Agnes company showing how eight sleepers can fit inside the Flying Diamond 8:

You can see that if the sleeper in the middle of the pack needs to get up in the middle of the night, there will probably be some grumbling from the others. I suppose some people actually camp like that, but I can't imagine why. I'd bring fewer campers or more tents, or I'd rig a tarp or sleep under the stars, although my experience of last night is a reminder of why a tarp or sleeping under the stars is not always an option. (By the way, I don't fault the Big Agnes company for claiming that their tent sleeps eight. All tent-makers follow the same convention in naming their tents; they name them for the maximum number of persons who can be laid out on the floor.)

Here's a picture of our new tent with the rainfly in place:

I slept in the tent last night in our back yard. I wanted to set up the tent to see what it was like and to learn how to do it. (I’ve learned from sad experience that you don’t want to find yourself using a flashlight to read the instructions for the first time as you try to set up your brand-new tent at night on a riverbank in the pouring rain.) I thought my family, or some of them might want to have a back-yard campout while the tent was up. Unfortunately, the weather forecast was very discouraging: 100% chance of rain, and thunderstorms highly likely after midnight, along with blustery winds. My wife opted out. At first, my two daughters said they would join me in the tent. I knew the younger would bail out when it came time to actually say goodnight to mom and head off for the tent, but I thought there was a fairly good chance that the older one would stick with it. As it turned out, she bailed, too. Neither one was willing to brave the wilds of our backyard without their mother, sad to say.

But I stuck with my plan and thought the predicted rain and wind would actually be a pretty good test. I put the rainfly on and tied it down with extra guylines to prepare for the expected blow. There was only a slight drizzle when I drifted off to sleep but I was later awakened by a hard blast of wind that was strong enough to push the wall of the tent inward momentarily to where it was almost horizontal and touched my face for a few seconds before the tent sprung back into shape. Then the rain came. It was ferocious. The sound of the rain on the fly grew so loud that I began to wonder if it was mixed with hail. I was glad then that my kids weren’t with me, for they surely would have panicked at this point.

Then the lightning and thunder started. At first, I tried to count the seconds between the flash and the thunder to estimate the distance, but there were so many flashes and so much thunder that it became impossible to pair the flash with its corresponding rumble, so I gave up--but not before concluding that the lightning was very close.

I began to try to evaluate the risk I was putting myself in. I knew it was low: there wasn’t much chance that I was going to be struck by lightning. Still, my chances of being struck were much greater in my back yard than they would be in my house. The risk was low, but the “delta” of the risk (as the engineers would say) was great. I began to have serious doubts about whether I was doing a smart thing.

And something else began to bother me. I realized how incredibly stupid I would sound in the news story that would report my being struck by lightning. I started imagining all the “Darwinism in action” jokes that strangers would make at my expense. (The jokes come too late, however, since I've already reproduced. Hah!)

On the other hand, if I abandoned my backyard campout, what message would I be sending my kids? That camping is dangerous, even in your own backyard?

These were the things I was thinking as the lighting kept flashing and the thunder kept banging. Ultimately, I couldn’t stand the thought of the postmortem mortification I would feel from the headline: “Local Man Killed by Lightning Strike While Camping in Back Yard During Thunderstorm Warning.” I gave up and dashed to the house in my underwear at about 4:30 a.m., where I dried off and crawled into my real bed, feeling defeated.

This morning, I surveyed the damage. There wasn’t much. There was a little water in the tent. I’m not sure where it came from. It might have come through the little hooded windows in the rainfly, which allow for ventilation but are configured so that rain would have to be falling almost sideways (or upwards) to come through the openings. You have the option of closing them, and perhaps I should have. Or maybe the water in the tent came in when I opened the door to make my dash for the house. Or maybe the tent just leaked. As strong and unrelenting as the rain was, I wouldn’t fault the tent for taking on a little water.

The wind pulled the stakes loose from the vestibule portion of the rainfly at the front door. I have an idea how I can avoid that the next time I face strong winds in this tent.
But the main thing I would do differently if I had it to do over again is that I would have stayed in the tent throughout the storm. I had a golden opportunity to teach my girls that rainstorms while camping are nothing to be particularly afraid of and that camping is a safe thing to do. Instead, I ran for cover. I blew it very badly. But what’s done is done.

(The news reported today that the local airport reported a wind gust of 69 m.p.h. at 4:02 a.m. and widely scattered hail. A tornado with winds close to 100 m.p.h. inflicted major damage to the roof of a high school in the western part of the county. Today, though, the weather was very nice.)