Merry Blue Christmas

The man is alone on Christmas Eve. A window glows in the house across the street. He can hear somebody else's loved ones rushing home through the icy snow. His ex took most of their ornaments when she left; still, he has hung the ones that remain because they remind him of his old life. But holding on to those memories just makes a miserable night longer.

Kansas City singer Mike Ireland tells this story in a quavering tenor, accompanied by an innocent melody pinged out on a xylophone, its notes sparkling like lights on a tree. It's Christmas, what is supposed to be the happiest time of the year, but as he remembers pledging his love beneath that long-ago tree, here's what he's singing: Our first kiss to our first year/And our first lies to our first angry tears, wept/As the neighborhood slept.

Ireland's "Christmas Past," from his 1998 album Learning How to Live, isn't exactly the kind of stuff you hear on KUDL this time of year. But if you can stand to listen to it, the song is exquisitely gorgeous and true — a testament to what this season really feels like for more people than Hallmark would have us believe.

So for all of you out there, here's an alternative season's greeting, courtesy of some Kansas City musicians.

In "Christmas in Missouri" by Howard Iceberg and the Titanics, a troubled character walks down lonely streets in St. Louis. Like Ireland, all he has are memories of happier, noisier holidays.

An especially bright star shines down on the intersection of Delmar and Eighth.

I could use a few words from those wise men tonight/To help me with what's left of my faith, Iceberg sings.

Iceberg, a wild-haired folksinger who works as an immigration lawyer, says he wrote the song because he wanted to capture a feeling.

"You know, my background is Jewish — I didn't grow up celebrating Christmas. But I've also written several songs about Texas, and I've never been to Texas, either. I wanted to do a Christmas song, my version of a melancholy song."

Iceberg celebrates Christmas every year with his partner, Kathy Kirby, and her family. "Our niece and nephews, who we're very close to, are growing up now, and I had it in mind that they don't run around and scream and tear open the presents like they did in the old days. I tried to match what it would be like to be an empty nester, looking back at the days of the bright, laughing Christmases."

Don't be in such a hurry, he reminds himself in the chorus. It's over before you know it. He could be referring to Christmas, could be referring to life.

That's what Tom Hall's singing about on a version of "Silent Night" rewritten to reflect the tenuousness of life in a violent Kansas City. Silent night, holy night/Shots ring out, flashing lights, Hall begins, Each day measured in human life/Suffer the children to pay the price/We live our days in fear/We live our days in fear. A gospel choir from Swope Parkway United Christian Church comes in for a chorus — Let's join together as one/That the light of love will shine — in an arrangement by Joe Miquelon (then a sideman for Ida McBeth, now with the Elders).

The lyrics are by the Pilgrim Chapel's Rev. Roger Coleman. "I started writing it as a protest of the war in Iraq, and there was so much violence that year in Kansas City," Coleman recalls of the 2004 composition. The CD was well-done, he says, "But I couldn't get anyone's attention."

At least Chuck Haddix gave it some attention on last year's Christmas edition of The Fish Fry on KCUR 89.3. Last year's Fish Fry, archived at at kcur.org, is worth listening to just for "Silent the Night" and for the gently swinging solos in Jay McShann's instrumental "Hootie's KC Christmas Prayer."

And for Julia Lee's 1947 song "Christmas Spirits."

Christmas spirits all around me, sings Lee, a bawdy godmother of our city's jazz and blues heyday, but I just don't feel a thing. The line's so true that, for the first verse, she just sings it again.

The recording (by Julia Lee and her Boyfriends, on the album Kansas City's First Lady of the Blues) starts with musicians warming up. Someone plays a slow, loose "Jingle Bells" riff on the piano, a sax player splurts out some notes, and men joke raucously in the background. But things get quiet, and the music's soft when Lee starts singing. I'm afraid old Santa won't be coming/'Cause what I want most, he can't bring.

She's talking about a man when she says she wants what Santa can't give her, but she might as well be talking about all of those other hopes that turn out to be Christmas lies — joy to the world, peace on Earth, goodwill toward men. Hell, for a lot of people, just paying that subprime mortgage or getting health insurance would be a Christmas miracle.