She’s Back! “Are You Lonely Tonight, Mrs. Claus?” and Other Holiday Traditions

Today I would like to share with you, in what seems to be the beginnings of a new holiday tradition, my illustrated video for “Are You Lonely Tonight, Mrs. Claus?” It’s a song I wrote a few years ago with Craig Wright of the Tropicals, and I will be showing it to you every year until they shut down the internet. I hope you dig it.

I greet you from bright and absurdly temperate Los Angeles, where I’ve now lived with my family for more than two years. For a couple of months I’ve been taking the lack of winter for granted. But today as I strolled across a parking lot to my car, it suddenly struck me very strange to feel the sun warming my shoulders on December 6th.

Christmas sneaks up on a Minnesotan in a hot clime. Living in southern California, my body misses the progression towards the holidays: the slow change in the trees and in the air from summer to fall, then the first delicate snows on brown grass, then an inward turning of the psyche into a wrap of protective melancholy, and then the comforting sound of hopeful, super-sad of Christmas carol melodies on tinny speakers of commercial zones.

Those songs stir emotions in me, deeply linked to childhood dreams, childhood greed for toys, childhood love for family and for playing in snow. They’re made infinitely more special because they only arise once a year. (I think that one reason so many of us are irked by the ever-expanding holiday retail season is that the specialness can only be spread across so many months before it isn’t special anymore. Those songs are supposed to emerge all at once like a present coming out of a box, not act as the smeary sonic backdrop to the entire fall and winter! It would be like taking the baseball playoffs and extending them so that they last for half of the baseball season! Unthinkable, but I digress.)

This evening our 5-year-old suddenly shouted in a panic, “Mom! We forgot to light the Hanukkah candle tonight!” My wife said, “Honey, we’re not Jewish, so we don’t have to light any Hanukkah candles.” 5 year-old: “I want to be Jewish! Why can’t we be Jewish! Why can’t we light Hanukkah candles?” I get it. The draw of a special, yearly tradition is strong and magical, especially for a five year old. And for a five year old, waiting a year is almost like waiting forever.

We live in an age of re-invention and re-purposing. But are we the first to re-cycle traditions from other cultures? Probably not. One wing of my family sings “Mele Kalikimaka” on Christmas Eve, and bangs Indonesian gongs on New Years Eve. I dust off my holiday songs on the piano every year and coax my extended family to sing them.