No Smiles Without Tears

By Sarah Nagle 

Editor's Note:  This is one of the commentaries selected from Robin's weekly newsletter Patriot Neighbors.  If you wish to get the full edition, E-mail her at PatriotNeighbors@yahoo.com to get on her list, it's free. RK

Earlier today my dad asked me if Janet's boyfriend made it home from the war. (In passing in an email message, I mentioned a family friend who was ironing and listening to the radio on December 7th, 1941, when she heard the news about the attack on Pearl Harbor. About 45 minutes later her date that night, a nice young man in the ROTC, called her up to cancel their date.) 

Janet's nice young man didn't make it home. Janet married a young Marine after the war who did make it home from the bloody Pacific. They had a long marriage that mixed the good and bad times, in much the same way America mixed the good and bad times over the past eighty years or so.

Life is complicated. Maybe life is better when it is complicated. A couple of years before Janet died, a beloved family pet passed. I was a child still, and a pet funeral looms large when you are young. Janet told me that it was o.k., that life is better when you embrace the tears. A few years later, when Janet passed away, I embraced the tears. (Actually, I sobbed, ugly tears with snot and all. At the best of times I'm not pretty, luckily I don't wear makeup so at least mascara didn't run and no one cares what I look like.) Grief can be an ugly thing. But, in the years since then, I've come to realize that a life without grief might be uglier. Maybe you don't get real smiles without accepting that there will be tears too.

Christmas—the whole "holiday season"—is about both smiles and tears. Every year of my life, some full-of-himself columnist, or talking-head, has decried the "commercialization of Christmas" —and, by extension, the entire long stretch of our dark winter holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Valentine's Day, whatever—but, as I've gotten older, it has become obvious that decrying the commercialization of Christmas is just another Christmas tradition. But, perhaps, a tradition born of people who haven't been encouraged to embrace both the sadness and smiles.

As a nation, Americans have a complicated relationship with holidays, all holidays. I have a devout Christian friend who calls Christmas the "schmaltziest" ecumenical holiday. (He's well aware that some of our best known, most loved, Christmas songs were written by Jewish Americans. The song, White Christmas, was written by Irving Berlin.) He's also aware that most of our most beloved Christmas traditions are really folk traditions of Northern Europe that somehow survived from the pre-Christian days and then went international in the 19th century. (Umm... Mistletoe, really has nothing to do with a child born in Bethlehem. Interestingly, another American named Irving was involved in recycling that tradition.

Interestingly, another American named Irving was involved in recycling that tradition.)

Christmas, like most major holidays, is about tradition. But, it is also about confronting how traditions change over time because we change. We lose people along the way. Children are born, loved ones die. People who always made it home for Christmas, don't get to make it home every year.

Back in late 2020, I was playing around with the idea of how to confront loss at Christmas. My early Covid passion project involved planting the plants at the Marin War Memorial. As the days got shorter, the nights got longer, I started to think about the loss every generation of Americans has experienced at Christmas. And, I thought about the joy too. All of our veterans of the First World War are gone now, most of our veterans of the Second World War and Korea will leave us in the next few years. 

The men and women of Vietnam are around my dad's age. And, we're still, as a nation, coming to terms with our more recent wars. But, it is important to remember that everyone who has left us was once young and alive. The twentieth century is interesting, in part, because it is never really over. We can still hear and see the twentieth century. So, bored by a Covid Christmas of social-distancing, I dug through music on YouTube and made a list of the songs of each wartime Christmas.

I dare you to listen to these songs without a few tears. But, without tears, there are no smiles. No real smiles anyway. And, it is better to live, love and cry, than it is to never embrace life. So here is a list of Christmas songs and "Christmas" stories for the dark weeks of the year.

The Roses of Picardy, is, for me, the sad beautiful sound of the First World War. The men and women who survived the war in France and grew old, still capable of crying whenever the sad lilting undanceable sound of the Roses of Picardy played on the Victrola even when they had grown old, are all long dead now. But, I dare you to listen to the Roses of Picardy without feeling the sweet schmaltzy hope at the heart of Christmas.

Stumble on towards World War II and, without a doubt, the one song that truly spoke to everyone in the 1940s is, I'll Be Home for Christmas.

And then, Korea... There is no one particular song that defines the American experience during the Korean War. Weirdly, the most popular Christmas song of the Korean War era is a novelty song called Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer. The reality is that the Korean War came so soon after World War II that the heart tugging songs of the 1940s were still on the radio. Over thirty thousand Americans were killed in uniform during the Korean War. Their bodies are still being recovered. Almost six million Americans served in uniform during the Korean War.

And then, basically a generation after the Second World War, we had Vietnam. There really is no defining song of the Vietnam War. At least, there is no defining Christmas song. After I’ll Be Home for Christmas maybe every other purely Christmas song would have to be second rate. 

There were protest songs written during the Vietnam War. A lot of them. But, the song that was the most popular song played on radios listened to by American servicemen in Vietnam during the Vietnam years is probably the Janis Joplin version of Me and Bobby McGee. It isn’t a war song, and it isn’t a Christmas song. But, it is a song about freedom and it has the weird intense rock and roll feel of America in the late 1960s and early 70s.

And then... our longest wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

It is hard to understand history when you live it, and we live history every day. For some weird reason, even though I've never been to Iraq, and I never got to see Toby Keith perform live, Toby Keith's version of If I Was a Cowboy makes me think of Americans driving past an ancient temple archaeological site somewhere near Baghdad in the early years of this century, wishing they were somewhere else, riding horses instead of trucks, and doing things right instead of leaving the pretty redhead hanging for twenty seasons of a television program that went off air before I was born. (And yes, I knew someone who hated country music, but always sang along to Toby Keith because he did listen to Toby Keith’s If I Was A Cowboy when he headed into Iraq.)

There are a lot of lonely people in the world. Covid probably made a lot of people lonelier. Maybe you are one of the lonely people. If so, you aren't alone. Really, you aren't alone. But, it can be hard to reach out. It can feel hard to feel authentically a part of a world that now seems more fractured than ever before. But, as Janet said, we have to embrace the tears as well as the smiles. So... as we head towards the darkest day of the year, as we head towards sometimes difficult memories, maybe we need to embrace it all so we can really enjoy 2025.