Merry rocking Christmas

I was driving along Montlake Boulevard a couple of days ago, and caught myself humming to myself the 1957 hit Christmas song, "Jingle Bell Rock."

I was a teenager when "Jingle Bell Rock" was released, and I was ok with rock music.  But I was appalled at the concept of a Christmas song with a rock beat.  I wiped it forever from my approved list.  And now, the better part of a century later, I find myself cheerfully humming it -- singing the lyrics when I could remember them -- as I started and stopped my way through the traditional Montlake traffic jam.

In retrospect, I really was a puritanical teenaged lad.  Or, more accurately, I was a culturally conservative one.  If a piece of music wasn't a traditional Christmas song -- i.e., one that I remembered from "my childhood" five years earlier -- it had no reason to exist.

For me -- probably for my entire family -- the basic canon of Christmas music was established by our five-disk, 78 rpm album of Bing Crosby classics, one that dated back to 1945.  The album contained ten carols or songs.  Only four, I now note, were actual traditional carols -- "Silent Night," "Adeste Fideles," "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," and "Jingle Bells."  Others, however, seemed equally venerable to me at the time -- "White Christmas," certainly.  "I'll be Home for Christmas" and "Santa Claus is Coming to Town."  Others on the album, were sort of, "whatever": We played through them as the records dropped, one by one, on our record changer and we became used to them, without really warming up to them.

So obviously, when I say that Bing's album was the basic canon, I exaggerate.  It was amply supplemented by songs from my book of Christmas piano music, by songs we sang in music classes and school assemblies at school, and songs we sang at Sunday School and Church.   None of these supplements, however, endorsed the likes of "Jingle Bell Rock."

And yet, for generations then unborn, no doubt, it has become one of the great classics.  It has become elevator music, and thus admitted to the pantheon of cherished tunes.

As a kid, I made little distinction between "sacred" and "secular" carols.  I laughed with everyone else to the 1944 novelty "classic," "All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth."  I even had View Master (q.v.) reels illustrating "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer."  I found the 1952 hit "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" somewhat embarrassing -- a bit risqué, perhaps, and subversive of the Santa Claus myth, and thus harmful to the morals of the little ones.  But I dutifully listened to it without vocal complaint. 

Elvis was still suspect in my rigid little mind, and his 1957 release of "Blue Christmas" caused me to roll my eyes.  But I viewed that song as more of a love song than a Christmas song, and because it wasn't a sung to a rollicking rock beat, it escaped my scathing censure.

As is obvious, my touchstone for separating the gold from the dross in Christmas music was "I know what I like, and I like what I know."  I recall informing my mother that Bing Crosby was sort of the gold standard as far as I was concerned.  Imagine my surprise when she laughed.  She told me that when Bing began singing Christmas songs, he was attacked as ruining, with his moaning and groaning, the traditional songs beloved by all.  He was the first popular singer to ever record Christmas music, and traditionalists just plain didn't like it.

Just like me and "Jingle Bell Rock."  There's a lesson there somewhere for us all, undoubtedly, but I'm too old to figure out what it is. 

[Walks away from his computer, humming to himself]

"What a bright time, it's the right time
To rock the night away
Jingle bell time is a swell time
To go gliding in a one-horse sleigh."