Mike Power

This is going to be a special Christmas for all the wrong reasons. It will be my first without some people I love who have died. Just like last year. I have reached an age where most years ahead will include the death of someone I love. Right up to that Christmas when I am the loved one who is mourned.

Every year brings other milestones too: obvious things like births, marriages, and graduations, as well as those little things that pop up in the middle of even the most ordinary years, like finding a new job or hobby or friend or love. Maybe every Christmas is special because every Christmas lights a fire in the heart of each person who celebrates it and, for a short season, the idea of peace on earth doesn’t sound like a punchline.

The inevitable question is a simple one: Why can’t we keep this feeling through the year? I never heard a satisfactory answer. The only thing I see standing in our way is a primitive fear that if we let down our guard and open ourselves up to that kind of love, bad people will take advantage of us.

Christmas in old age has almost too many memories. It becomes overwhelming to try to understand the world you were born into. How could things have been so different back then? When did the tinsel that hung on every tree disappear from drug store shelves? What happened to sending and receiving piles of cards? Every year some beloved Christmas tradition dies with the passing of its last adherent. It is good to remember them kindly as we will each eventually become a Ghost of Christmas Past to those we leave behind.

Until we become the Ghosts of Christmas Past, we would do well to take a page from the bard of the season, Charles Dickens:

There are people who will tell you that Christmas is not to them what is used to be; that each succeeding Christmas has found some cherished hope, or happy prospect, of the year before, dimmed or passed away; that the present only serves to remind them of reduced circumstances and straitened incomes – of the feasts they once bestowed on hollow friends, and of the cold looks that meet them now, in adversity and misfortune. Never heed such dismal reminiscences. There are few men who have lived long enough in the world, who cannot call up such thoughts any day in the year. Then do not select the merriest of the three hundred and sixty-five for your doleful recollections, but draw your chair nearer the blazing fire – fill the glass and send round the song – and if your room be smaller than it was a dozen years ago, or if your glass be filled with reeking punch, instead of sparkling wine, put a good face on the matter, and empty it off-hand and fill another, and troll off the old ditty you used to sing, and thank God it’s no worse.

Just when the magic of Christmas starts to fade as we get older, a new generation comes along to bring it back. All the wonder and joy of the season is reflected in fresh eyes. Memories flood from the time when our own eyes were clear and bright. Only now, we are Santa Claus. We are the ones who get to carry a sack of Christmas magic on our backs. We listen and watch and ask, “what do you want Santa to bring you?”

Magically, things that were relegated to the past become present again: school holiday concerts, making snowmen and snow angels, and sledding down a hill covered with snow so fresh that it is still falling. You can hear the excitement of the season whooshing downhill with you.

Home is now your own invention. You have traditions to fall back on but you also invent some new ones to match the times you live in, the new holiday music and movies you absorb, and the new creatures – human and otherwise - who share your home.

One of the oldest traditions to fall back on is the Tannenbaum. People have been putting trees in the middle of their living rooms for 500 years and there is still a strange mix of the absurd and the familiar whenever the tree goes up and the outside comes in. I never met a child or a cat who didn’t love a Christmas tree.

In fact, the only time a cat doesn't like a Christmas tree is when they are being herded in front of it for a holiday photo.

It was over Christmas break in my freshman year of college that I wrote a letter confessing my love. I was better at confession back then because it had only been a few years since I did so regularly. Religiously, even.

The Christmases that followed over the next couple of decades with the recipient of that letter saw love exploding all over the place. The magic of Christmas migrated from my parents’ house to our off-campus housing, then to our studio apartment on Bleecker Street. Friendships and traditions that live to this day were born in those early yuletide seasons where I learned that Christmas, like all good things (and it is one of the best things), is all about love.

There is a reason, you might even call it a trick, that Christmas is celebrated at this time of year. The trick always worked on me: Late December is not the worst time of the year, it’s the best. The darkness and cold outside are overwhelmed by the light and warmth inside.

The love that blossomed from the seed of that letter became even more exciting than Christmas, and it lasted all year. Over the years, as the excitement fades, it is replaced with something more profound, something that transcends time in a way that is impossible for something as transitory as excitement. It is something that is beyond words, something that you have to feel to understand. Kind of like the Christmas spirit.

My first memories of Christmas are its smells. I’m getting a whiff of peppermint. And why is there a pine tree in the middle of the living room? Not that I mind. Quite the opposite. The cat likes to curl up under the blinking lights that excite all of us, even if they do make the black-and-white TV screen go fuzzy at irritatingly predictable intervals. It’s worth it.

And the music is strangely familiar. I recognize that melody. They play it when it gets cold outside.

It’s not just the tree in the living room and the inspired music. There are stories and movies that disappeared eleven months ago that show up like they never left. The mood of everyone around is building to a crescendo. Then the night comes.

Santa Claus can’t come until you’re in bed. It’s as simple as that. For one night each year, Mom and Dad can cuddle up on the couch, have a cocktail, and watch the tree and Johnny Carson while faint memories of their childhoods on a farm in Massachusetts or the streets of New York waft through their subconscious.

Who can sleep? You might drift off for an hour or two before coming to your senses. Then, around 4:00, you give up hope of sleep. It’s your first experience of insomnia. Your brother can’t sleep either so you talk about what presents you might get and how long it will be before Mom and Dad wake up.

Your attempts to wake them are met with “Go back to bed.” But you can’t go back to bed. That would be admitting defeat. So you sit on the top stair, looking down into your living room, peering at the corners of the magic of Christmas morning.

A lot of people don’t like Christmas music. For one thing, they start playing them too early in the year. They remind us of the darkest and coldest time of year, and of our childhood, which was a dark and cold time in some of our lives. I get it, but I’m not one of those who have a problem with Christmas songs. In fact, I have written a few myself, including this one that I wrote last week.

Christmas songs often deal with A) snow, B) presents, or C) Jesus. A lot of them also deal with love, of both the romantic and universal varieties. This song is about that last thing. You might have noticed that there is a lot of anger and hate roaming our society these days. There is a lot to be angry about and a lot of things that deserve to be hated. Christmas is the time of year to push those things to the back burner and to fill the pots closest to us with compassion, forgiveness, and for offering a hand in friendship to any who will take it in theirs. It is the time, as the saying goes, for peace on Earth and goodwill toward everyone.

Let’s give it a try Now That It’s Christmastime.

It’s Thanksgiving 2025 which makes this a good day to make a list of things to be thankful for. I’ll start:

1. The past, future, and eternal present (maybe that’s 3)

2. Skin

3. Dolphins

4. Gravity

5. The speed of light

6. The light in your eyes

7. The pain of lost love

8. Sexual attraction

9. Suppressed laughter

10. Tears of empathy

11. Kaleidoscopes

12. New York City

13. A good night’s sleep

14. The sacrifices of our ancestors

15. Hope

16. Baseball

17. Motion pictures

18. The guitar

    

19. Meditation

20. Pizza

21. The Beatles

22. You

23. Life

24. Death

25. Every Little Thing

When I was a child I thought there was a land of make-believe where the people in the fairy tales lived. When I got older I thought that just was the foolishness of childhood. Now that I’m older, I realize the land of make-believe does exist. I went there last week.

The City of Angels has a unique talent for blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. The snow we stepped over leaving a friends apartment wasn’t real – it was foam that was sprayed there for a movie they were shooting – but the man being held down that we stepped around thinking it was a movie was actually a burglar being apprehended by the police.

It makes you think. It makes you ask questions. Did I really ride in a car without a driver? Did I play a Steinway piano that Randy Newman and John Williams played before me? Did I get interviewed on a red carpet and a podcast? Did I perform my song The Light In Your Eyes in front of hundreds of people at the world premiere of Celeste Friedman’s wonderful film Love and Karma? I’m not sure but you can watch this video and see for yourself.

I wrote this song the day after Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York. But it’s not about him. It’s about the people, mostly but not only young people, who got up out of their complacency and conspiracies, and knocked on doors and talked with their neighbors and, as incredible as it seems at this moment in our history, put their faith in a politician.

Everyone who is paying attention knows that we are at a turning point in American politics. Our two parties are mostly out of touch with the people they represent. The Democrats have a Senate and House Minority Leader – both from New York City - who either refused to endorse, or reluctantly endorsed, their own party’s candidate for the mayor of the largest city in the country, despite the enthusiasm of their base. Republicans are so terrified of their base that they have taken to boldfaced lying on their behalf and daring anyone to arrest them for the metastasizing crimes of the cult leader they surrendered The Party of Lincoln to. They know he would pardon them anyway.

So I wrote this song in tribute to honest people on every side who I believe are going to get this country back on track, in spite of ourselves.

You are the one your ancestors knocked down barriers for
You are the one generations to come will remember for knocking down more

You are the one the world is calling to catch everybody falling
You’re the one
You are the one the world is calling to catch everybody falling
You are the one

You are the one they always said could not get the job done
You are the one they still secretly pinned all of their hopes on

You are the one the mystics mentioned when fortunes were being told
You are the one who found out way too young what it feels like to grow old

This is one of those times that ends
With everybody saying “never again”
Meanwhile this pitiless world keeps
Turning around, turning around, and around

You are the one who terrifies them because they know you are going to win
You are the one who’s going to hold it all together when everything starts to spin

You are the one they danced in the streets for
You are the one they carried their dreams for
You are the one they died in the fields for
You are the one they always knew you would be

When I was a boy I collected stamps. It seemed a harmless enough hobby. I would buy bags of used stamps at the local farmers’ market and, after soaking them to remove the envelope fragments to which they were attached, I would affix a stamp hinge to the back of each and add them to the collection in my Traveler Stamp Album. My father kept his eye out for interesting stamps that crossed his desk at work and brought them home for me.

I collected celebrity autographs too. I had a book with the addresses of TV and movie studios that I used to write to my favorite stars with a fan letter/autograph request. I could usually tell which ones were actual signatures and which were reproductions. The Jimmys – Cagney and Stewart – were real.

In my teens, I started collecting records. Once I fell into that rabbit hole I never stopped falling. I haven’t hit the bottom yet.

I was never one to collect sexual conquests or the hearts of the ones who made mine tender. The first one was too precious to abandon in pursuit of another. I guess that is what cured me of my habit of collecting.

When people get drunk habitually, or get divorced, or commit suicide, it can be because it is something they saw their parents do and, even if they hated it, they see it as behavior that is possible.

People who get through the day without chemical enhancement, or stay with their partner through thick and thin, or cling to every last breath of life, can do it for the same reason.