Merry Christmas from the Midcentury

Long after I stopped believing in Santa, but was still a kid, there was a magical visitor to my suburban neighborhood that I looked forward to every Christmas. It was a caroling wagon: some kind of motorized vehicle, blurry in my memory, that was draped with lights and ridden by people waving and ringing bells. It had the feel of a parade float, and may have actually been part of a small holiday parade, but I don’t recall the other participants. I only remember peering at this music “wagon” from behind my bedroom curtains. I heard it before seeing it, because they blared Christmas songs by the Ray Conniff Singers.

I always got joy from listening to Christmas music, but the Ray Conniff Singers were not in rotation in our house, nor in my cassette/CD collection (which included Mariah Carey and The Judds), nor did I hear them much on the radio alongside other midcentury greats like Nat “King” Cole and Bing Crosby. It felt like their choral voices were exclusively a herald of this local parade. From today’s perspective, their musical style was unquestionably cheesy. They sounded like 25 of the stuffiest, whitest, most by-the-book singers you could imagine, backed by an orchestra. The singers were so numerous that each recording sounds like it needed to be captured in a high-ceilinged church. It always sounded a bit like they were actually outside my house, voices echoing in the night, caroling for all of us. In the absence of real-life carolers, this was a treat.

Given that there was no more Santa Claus in our house, and my younger brother and I were in our teens/tweens, Christmas was still fun for us, but not magical. My dad no longer did my favorite trick where he laid out three mudballs atop the fence in our backyard (we didn’t get snow in Sacramento), then showed us on Christmas morning that they’d miraculously turned into three oranges. Our parents had stopped leaving big surprise gifts, like bikes, by the fireplace for us to find after Santa’s supposed visit. We kids had started sleeping in rather than getting up before dawn to tear into our filled stockings. But I still liked to find magic where I could. Nobody else in my house may have cared, but I got a secret joy from hearing this unabashed chorus of Christmas singers from a bygone era, mysteriously floating down my street on a cloud of glowing lights, fading away as quickly as they’d appeared.