Two hours ago, I was with some friends in a restaurant where four Christmas carolers were making the rounds, stopping at each table and asking, "Do you have a favorite holiday song we could sing for you?" When they got to ours, I asked if they knew "Be a Santa" and was not surprised that they didn't. Their repertoire was formidable — two of them were clutching 4"-thick binders crammed with lyric sheets — but they were unfamiliar with the tune by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jule Styne from the not-too-successful 1961 Broadway show, Subways Are For Sleeping. If you never heard it, you can hear it here.
(And if it sounds a little familiar to you maybe you're recalling it from this recent post on this blog.)
Subways Are for Sleeping, by the way, is the musical that the infamous producer David Merrick kept running longer than it might have thanks to a sneaky trick. I wrote about it on this blog sixteen (gulp!) years ago.
Getting back to the carolers: Someone else in our party then requested a more conventional song and they favored us with that. But when they got to the next table, do you know what the diners there requested? "Baby, It's Cold Outside."
Later, I ran into one of the carolers in a line for the men's room and we got to talking. I asked him if that song was enjoying a new boom in requests. He said, "I guess you could say it is. Since we began doing this this year, it's been requested about three times a night. That's an increase from the last four years when I did this and nobody asked for it at all." He also told me a couple of people objected to being asked "Do you have a favorite holiday song we could sing for you?" That's what they were told to say but it draws the occasional reply of "Why can't you ask if we have a favorite CHRISTMAS CAROL?"
I asked him what the reply to that was. He said he told them, "We have Hanukkah songs. We have New Year's songs. We have a lot that just say 'Enjoy the holiday season!'" Then he added, "That doesn't seem to satisfy any of them."
I'm weary of these people who are battling the War on Christmas that exists only in their tiny minds and as a ginned-up controversy on Fox News. They seem to think that roaming bands of Thought Police are arresting and/or beating up people who say "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays." Personally, I always thought "Happy Holidays" was like "Seasons Greetings" or "Joy to the World" or "Glad Tidings" — a shorthand way of saying "Whatever you celebrate, I hope it's good for you." What an awful thing to say to someone.
Seems to me that some (note I did not write "all") people believe this is a Christian Nation and Christianity is the one true religion in the world, and saying anything else but "Merry Christmas" is an insidious plot by all those faux religions to deny that fundamental truth. If anything is harming Christianity these days, it's people who claim to be Christians and then do unChristlike deeds. There are a lot of them in the news lately.