This Christmas

I can still recollect the cold December day I heard Donny Hathaway joyfully singing This Christmas. For a kid who played trumpet through elementary and junior high school the big horn arrangement that opens and accompanies the song thrilled me instantaneously.  I was on East 71st Street and Jeffrey Boulevard in Chicago and the record store nearby blared the newly released song from its outdoor speakers. And Donny sang gloriously:

Hang all the mistletoe

I’m gonna get to know you better

This Christmas

This was my very first Christmas season in the city of Chicago. It felt so different from the warmth of my family’s environs in New Orleans at Christmas. However, Hathaway’s and Nadine McKinnor, a postal worker, co-written melody, momentarily eased my homesickness and brought me elation. It not only brought me happiness, it brought joy and togetherness to the entire Black Chicago–Southsiders, and Westsiders, hustlers and strivers, activists and politicos, which was no easy feat. In a matter of days, This Christmas blasted across Black America through the sales of 45 rpm records and R&B radio stations in one city after the next. It was a song that made its way up to the pantheon of great Christmas recordings–Nat King Cole’s version of the Christmas Song,  Eartha Kitts’s Santa Baby, and Charles Brown’s Merry Christmas Baby. 

 This Christmas premiered almost a year to the date of the first anniversary of the predawn political assassinations of Chicago Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. As the song hit the airwaves public outrage boiled at President Nixon’s secretive invasion into Cambodia, which spurred the killings of four Kent State University students and two Jackson State University students all protesting the President’s disastrous skullduggery. It is history to many of you, but I watched on the television news the violent rampage of New York City construction workers beating up nonviolent anti-war protesters, infamously labeled as the  “hard hat riot,” which the Nixon administration condoned.  And most scandalous was the revelation that the U.S. Army had suppressed news that soldiers committed mass murder in a Vietnamese village called My Lai in 1968. Horribly the death toll continued for Vietnamese civilians, soldiers, and U.S. soldiers alike.

Our environmental habitat was also in the news. In April of 1970, there was the celebration of the first Earth Day. It was understood then, what we most clearly know in light of climate change, that the maniacal dimensions of the industrial order that fossil fuels uses were irreparably harming our earthly abode.  Congress enacted legislation and agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency that year, but entrenched interests paid off scientists and congressional representatives alike to support coal and oil over the development of safer forms of energy.

And sadly there were the deaths of the people who brought us music—Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died within three weeks of each other, both aged twenty-seven. 

When This Christmas hit the airwaves it radiated joy. The song didn’t change the rates of impoverishment in Black communities. Roughly 25% or more were broke and living in substandard housing. Drug addictions and inner-city violence was a menace. Police brutality and incarceration was even more so. This Christmas did not put an end to suffering or eradicate pollution.  

What it did do for the four minutes and nine seconds was to put a smile on a lot of faces. It reminded us that amid struggles there was joy, a joy that could be shared one to another. And with joy comes hope. Joy fills us with the courage to fashion a better world. Joy builds our stamina to endure the dogged routines that may grind us down. Joy is the key to living with and through struggles. 

This is what the Gospel writer Luke highlights in his telling of Jesus’s birth narrative. A baby born with issues of paternity was not unusual in the ancient or the contemporary world. It is commonplace.  A baby born in desperate circumstances in an alley or manger is sadly not exceptional either. It happens daily. Nothing is unusual about a lowly birth of a child anywhere in the world. What is notable is that an angel gives testimony to this pedestrian birth.  Perhaps a sign for all of us that there is something absolutely glorious about our daily lives.

 Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

This infant bears hope. And where hope derives from is always a surprise. This is why the angel says not to fear. We are called to embrace one another in and through our struggles. Remember to say:

Merry Christmas

Shake a hand, shake a hand now

Wish your brother [sister] Merry Christmas

All over the land, yeah