I love Christmas music. Once Thanksgiving is over, my house is constantly filled with the sounds of Bing Crosby, the Vince Guaraldi Trio, and John Denver and the Muppets. But there is something to be said for songs that aren’t traditional Christmas tunes that still reflect a particular aspect of the season.
The feeling that the Counting Crows capture with their song “A Long December” is a type of melancholy yearning that is a very real part of the holidays. For us Catholics in particular, the hopeful longing at the heart of the refrain — “It’s been a long December and there’s a reason to believe / maybe this year will be better than the last” — is a key part of the Advent season. As the year dies, and the new liturgical season begins, we are waiting in joyful hope for the coming of Christ into our hearts and into our world.
It has been, by almost any measure, a very hard year, and I’ll be glad to put it behind me in the hopes that the new one to come is indeed better. But, at the same time, we don’t need to pretend that things have been better than they are. We don’t need to ignore the bad and difficult realities of our life and our world. There are peaks and valleys, or, as Adam Duritz sings, “It’s one more day up in the canyons / and it’s one more night in Hollywood.”
The song is (at least in part) about Duritz spending time with a friend in the hospital and the enduring hope that despite this rough patch things will get better. But it’s also about regrets and the desire for forgiveness and being in the midst of a long, cold season but not surrendering to the depression that this can bring.
Even those of us who love Christmas and find it to be the most wonderful time of the year (and I include myself in this number!) will, I think, recognize that it includes hard moments too. It requires some grace to get through everything this season entails. Hearing “A Long December” reminds me that (to paraphrase the great John Green) our now is not our forever and we will make it through the periods of stress and times of darkness. So although Duritz’s December song does not talk at all about Christmas, it does always help me keep alive the hope that the Christ Child brings.
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