John Butleron knowing when Christmas has really started
You know it's coming when you first spy a fat Santa laughing at something Rudolph said, the scene rendered in translucent streaks of red and brown paint across the window of a butcher's shop. If you stand in the right place, and squint a little, you can stare into the belly of one of Santa's little helpers and discern 15 raw lamb cutlets. I love it when the reindeers' legs are way out of proportion to their torsos. I love it when Santa's belly is the size of a reindeer or when the elves are taller than
Santa. In fact, the worse the scenes are, the more they represent the essential humanity of Christmas.
I never bought into the slick, saccharine version of Christmas peddled so expertly in commercials by American companies, notably Budweiser and Coca-Cola. An artist named Haddon Sundblom came up, in 1931, with Coca-Cola's iconic image of Santa, with the white beard, red suit and fur trim. Still, its ads are not for me, for the same reason I don't go to see effects-coated historical epics at the cinema. They leave me cold.
When it comes to the story of Christmas I prefer to think of my friend who used to work in a snow factory. What sounds like an impossibly magical, celestial place was in fact a breeze-block warehouse just off East Wall Road, in Dublin. A machine would churn out tons of fake snow made from crushed styrofoam, and Joe would bag it, load it and drive around Dublin selling it to pubs, shops and, presumably, the Ski Club of Ireland, in Kilternan, from the back of a Transit van. This story of Santa and his plastic sack of goodies, retold through the hyper-real prism of a Mike Leigh film, is Christmas to me.
I spent last Christmas Eve wandering around Bondi Junction, in Sydney, with a friend. It was my first December away from Ireland, and I was struggling to find any festive vibe when we caught the opening notes of Ding! Dong! Merrily on Highdrifting through the air at half-speed on what sounded like a trombone. The atmospheric nudge we needed was growing louder. We quickened our pace.
As the invisible trombonist crawled towards the last notes of the first line - the "in heaven the bells are ringing" bit - we rounded the corner. A moment before we caught sight of him he fluffed the last note hideously, plunging several octaves below what is melodically acceptable, and we both started to laugh uncontrollably. Then we saw him and stopped in our tracks.
In front of a music stand stood a 14-year-old boy, his trombone case open on the ground in front of him. Until that day I had never seen an Australian kid dressed as he was. Australian children are usually tanned, athletic, obnoxiously healthy and slightly jockish. This boy was pale, with too-long hair, too-short faded denim trousers and small wire glasses framing a worried face.
Distraught at having missed the note, and at being laughed at by two passers-by, he stopped playing abruptly. He began to hit himself repeatedly on the forehead with the palm of his hand, a well-practised and seemingly unconscious action.
We couldn't breathe. Standing 20 metres from the boy, we could now see, was his mother, undergoing the most severe case of separation anxiety imaginable. She was very heavy, dressed for a northern-hemisphere Christmas, and smiling bravely at her boy. The distance at which she stood was calculated to lend him support without smothering him, and now she stood her ground, willing him to perservere.
He grabbed the sheet music and ran off, hot tears in his eyes. We watched as she followed, caught up with him in the distance and put her arms around him. It was impossible to figure out whether she wanted him to perform or whether he wanted to overcome the hurdle and prove something to himself.
The only certainty was that we couldn't move on and leave the story where it was. We sat down on a nearby bench, in an unarticulated understanding that Christmas was cancelled unless this boy could return to the music stand, take his trombone and get down to the end of the carol, which, with its descending "glo-o-o-o-o-o-o, o-o-o-o-o-o, o-o-o-o-o-or-ria", seemed fiendishly difficult to manage on any instrument and quite impossible on a trombone.
After a few moments of complete silence my friend dug me in the ribs. The boy was back at the music stand, drying his eyes. His mother took up the same position 20 metres away, smiling encouragingly. He brought the trombone to his lips, glanced at the sheet music and began. Before he had reached the end of the first line my friend had jumped to her feet and was walking towards him. She dropped a large sum of money, coins and notes, on to the case. He noticed but kept going, and as he steered himself slowly towards to the danger note I got up and walked towards him.
Just as he was about to try the note I produced a large bill. As I reached him he fluffed it, parping out the same comical mistake at the same point, but this time nobody laughed. I dropped the note on to his case, his mother clapped, and he kept on playing. When he reached the descending Gloria he stumbled manfully through it. At the end of that mammoth line he pressed on to verse two, then verse three, then all the way to the end of the song.
Sure, there were bum notes, hundreds of them, and it was played at a fifth of its normal speed, but it was the most beautiful piece of music I have ever heard. The audience clapped until their hands were raw, and we earned a hint of a smile from the performer, and permission to start Christmas.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com