My Christmas wish this year is based on a song that I don’t really like…somehow appropriate for 2020. The song “Hard Candy Christmas” was written for the musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (because nothing says Christmas like a play about a brothel). However, since that time it has been recorded by several artist and has become a tier 2 or 3 Christmas standard.
Me, I’ll be just Fine and dandy
Lord, it’s like a hard candy Christmas
I’m barely getting through tomorrow
But still I won’t let
Sorrow bring me way down
The song is built on the image of families in lean years having to resort to the meager joys of cheap hard candy as opposed to luxurious chocolates or other confections. It’s a charming, nostalgic memory that is completely wiped from our experience. Would today’s equivalent be “A Kentucky Fried Chicken Christmas”? However, the idea comes across nonetheless.
So all I can wish for you is a hard candy Christmas. For most of us it won’t be great, and the joys we have will be small ones. However, this is the Christmas we are given, so lean into it. It won’t destroy you, and I hope you will find some tiny lights in the darkness.
In that spirit, I would like to share three small experiences that most of us can enjoy, even in this year of diminished expectations. Even if you don’t get the Christmas you want or the Christmas you deserve, there are tastes of sweetness from the hard candy of life
1. Watch Darlene Love sing “ Christmas, Baby Please Come Home on the David Letterman show. I’ve written about this before all the way back when Davis Letterman still had his show. A yearly tradition was to have Darlene Love on the show at Christmas time to sing her most famous classic from the Phil Spector Christmas album (this is skewing so old!). It started as a very simple thing, but the production values grew and grew, as each year, musical director Paul Shaffer worked to better capture the “Wall of Sound” of the original.
There are many, many versions on YouTube, and I recommend that you watch them all (there is even a “the making of” type video), but at least watch this one from 2009
2. Pop a Christmas Cracker
In the best of times, this is the silliest tradition, but there is something wonderful in the sheer stupidity. My mother always had crackers at the Christmas table, and though we lacked the coordination to ever manage the crossed arms group pull, the crackers always provided the opening act for the dinner. Though we all must pull our own cracker this year (shut up…you know what I mean), it can be a great reminder of Christmases past.
A paper crown, a tiny plastic toy and a very stupid joke.
- What is yellow and white and goes down the train track at 60 miles an hour.
- The engineer’s egg sandwich
3. Have a glass of Screwball.
Obviously this is not for young people (I have a friend who was put in Facebook jail for mentioning alcohol without an age warning!) or for those who don’t partake, but for those who are and do, it is a celebration. Screwball is peanut butter flavored whiskey…I know, I thought the same thing, and it is one of the most remarkably wonderful sipping beverages with the added benefit of warming a person up on the inside. Give it a try.
I hope when I greet you in 2021, this world (both micro and macro) will be a better place. However, thank you for walking though this awful year with me. Enjoy your hard candy Christmas.
Be safe, be strong.
As an added gift today, I have created a ten song playlist of “hard candy Christmas songs that those of you with Spotify can enjoy here.
I have a tale of egg sandwiches and rail roads which I will share with you privately.