It's Christmas and I have been thinking about songs.
About Christmas carols to be precise.
Everyone thinks Christmas carols were written long ago.
And for most that is true.
"Silent Night", for example, is a German carol -- Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht -- and was composed in 1818. "O Come All Ye Faithful" -- Adestes Fidelis -- was first sung in 1743. And "Angels We Have Heard on High" -- an English carol -- was created in1862. In fact, Wikipedia lists carols from thirty-two countries or cultures going back to the 12th century. The overwhelming majority of those songs were created well before the 20th century.
Another interesting fact is that the songs composed in the 20th century have a decidedly secular cast.
More Rudolph than religion.
"Silver Bells" was written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans in 1950. The "Christmas Song" -- Nat King Cole's "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire" -- was created in 1945 by Robert Wells and Mel Torme. And Rudolph's glory as the "Red Nosed Reindeer" first saw the light of day (or night as it were) in 1947.
Secular or saintly, however, the songs unite.
Every year around this time they come on and almost everyone chimes in with at least a bar or two, sometimes even the whole song. During the pre-Covid Christmas season in 2019, a crowd of morning commuters in a New York City subway station belted out Mariah Carey's 1994 hit, "All I Want for Christmas Is You". Or, as Shileligh Law put it in "Christmas in New York", their tribute to the victims of 9/11, "There's somebody singing a holiday song/You pick up the tune and start singin' along/You learned the words some time way back when/It's Christmas in New York again".
Sometimes the songs channel the Jesuits.
They challenge us to find God in the everyday.
To find the saintly in our very own secular.
Shileligh Law's 9/11 tribute was one:
My son this month is finishing up his second masters degree.
This one in business administration. The first was in public administration.
Most people choose one or the other. He is unique. In a world where ideologues mount their tribal parapets proclaiming the inherent superiority of one or the other sector, public or private, he has studied both and thus made himself an expert on the idiocy of all manner of present-day extremists.
He has always been like this.
In high school in a toney suburb, he and a friend decided to live in a treehouse for most of their senior year. In college, he and that same friend traipsed over a good chunk of South America, bribing their way in and out of Bolivia. On a family vacation in Mexico, he announced he was not returning with us but would instead take an overnight bus to Guatemala to visit his girlfriend. When he told my wife that he thought "Dad was not happy about this", she explained that "Dad's unhappiness" might have something to do with reports of active volcanoes and civil unrest along his chosen route.
None of these were full on marches to "see how the other half lives".
But he definitely knew his own circumstances were not typical.
And wanted to explore the differences.
After graduating from Colorado College, he ran a family farm in upate New York . . .
With no in-door plumbing.
While there, he resisted the political correctness of his little corner of liberal academia by hooking up with the Marines and applying to get into Officers Candidate School (OCS). Most of his college professor friends, and not a few fellow students, raised their eyebrows.
But he went to Quantico anyway.
And crashed out after two weeks.
At the end, a drill-sergeant type asked him what he intended to do to "grow up". He said he didn't know but that, right then and there, he wanted to "speak Spanish".
The officer thought he was nuts.
He wasn't.
He just didn't like being yelled at constantly.
I asked him how he had managed to spend a couple of years working to get into OCS if "yelling" -- their love of which the Marines do not keep secret-- was a problem. He told me he had intentionally avoided looking at that portion of the promotional video.
So he left OCS and got a job . . .
Speaking Spanish.
It was more than that, of course. He represented day laborers in their efforts to get work -- and get paid for it -- in northern Westchester County. Then it was on to the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation, a non-profit that for almost fifty years has been helping to bring businesses and jobs to that impoverished precinct. And most recently, as a senior officer at the National Development Council's Grow America Fund, he has been financing -- preserving really -- small businesses in America's northeastern rural rust belt.
In all three, he has married the conscience of a public sector idealist with the pragmatism of a private sector businessman.
To the notice of those in both.
Last year, during the height of Covid, Delaware's Sen. Chris Coons praised him for personally calling scores of his clients in that state, many of whom were getting the run around from the big banks, to walk them through the process and paperwork needed to get the Paycheck Protection Money that kept them in business. And one Mom and Pop hardware business even produced its own video singing his praises for getting them the financing larger banks would not provide.
Those are real differences . . .
For real people.
So NDC threw him a party.
Ostensibly for getting his MBA.
But really just for being . . .
Conor.
It's Christmas in New York again.
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