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."
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