"He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy."
During the universal transition from childhood to adulthood, something happens to our perspective of the holiday season. All of a sudden, Christmas is not as much about magic and imagination as it is about braving the traffic by the mall or finding the last available "Zhu Zhu Pet" or getting the Christmas cards out on time. The hustle and bustle of Christmas, which fueled our childhood anticipation, often times produces stress and anxiety instead during our adult years.
But I am an elementary music teacher with 500 pairs of innocent eyes under my tutelage. And though the Christmas season can be a music teacher's worst nightmare, I am pretty sure I have the best job in the world at this time of year.
As a general music specialist who manages to squeeze 220 elementary school kids onto 17 risers every year right before winter break, I have the distinct privilege of reliving that childhood excitement through a musical collective consciousness that includes reindeer that really can fly and a jolly, plump, older gentleman who shimmies down our chimneys on December 24.
So, I've decided to share the experiences with my loyal blog readers (and I know there are several of you) that keep me tapped into my youthful side during the Christmas season.
In the month leading up to the Christmas program, my students lead me into all sorts of philosophical discussions with age-old questions such as, "What if you don't have a chimney? How does Santa get into your house?"
"Santa's magic," another student will reply before I can even think of a sagacious response. "He can make a magical chimney."
"How does he get down it if he's so fat?" another child will ask.
"He can squeeze himself into any shape he wants," answers one of his/her classmates.
"Like a liquid shape-shifter," I add, pleased with my wisdom and my somewhat Sci-Fi reference.
Usually, after I have offered my adult input, I am met with blank stares.
This year, my favorite Christmas program story revolves around one of my 1st grade girls. Let's call her Jillie. Two weeks prior to the program, Jillie suddenly decided to sing in a shrill, high voice that hung out about a perfect fourth above the actual pitches of the songs. She had never sung like this before. She had always matched pitch and had always been one of my stronger singers. All of the other children in her class started giving her strange looks out of the corner of their eyes. Then they would glance at me and surreptitiously point at her as if to say, "What are you going to do about Jillie, Mrs. Duggan?"
I quickly put a stop to the kids' reactions, vowing never to be that "horror-story" music teacher who traumatizes students into never singing again because she allows the class to make fun of them or tells them to sing softer or just move their lips.
When we started practicing in the gymnasium, Jillie miraculously went back to singing on pitch, but with a bit more oomph than I had remembered her having in the classroom. She could be heard above everyone else, even when all 220 kids were singing at once. The program could have been entitled, "Jillie and the Back-up Chipmunks Sing Christmas." During the morning program, she sang different lyrics than everyone else on Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer. By the afternoon program, she had remembered the correct words again.
“Do you think she has a future as an opera singer?” one of the 3rd grade teachers asked me the next day.
The day after the program, we held a school-wide assembly where the faculty performed for the students and led the kids in a caroling sing along. Our last song was "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" and in walked a perfectly timed Santa with a "Ho ho ho!"
"Santa!" I exclaimed, eliciting a laugh from my principal who was most likely amused by my childlike salutation.
I wasn't alone in my sentiments. One of the first graders stuck his head in every classroom on his way back from the gym proclaiming, "Santa is here! No really, he's here! Santa Claus is here at school! Did you see him?"
That afternoon, I returned to my classroom and found a homemade card awaiting me on my desk, "Dear Mrs. 'Dunean,' Merry Christmas! I enjoyed your Christmas Program. I hope you get a nice present. Love, Rosalia."
Well, Rosalia, I did get a nice present, as I do every year. Like I said, I have the best job in the world.
"No Santa Claus! Thank God! He lives and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."
(Beginning and ending quotations from "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus," by Francis Pharcellus Church, September 21, 1897.)
