A once a day thing, I mean. My last post was at 11:58 pm on December 2 (in my time zone), and now it's December 3. Maybe I will write about a different Christmas song every day for weeks. Probably not, though.
All I want to say now, before going to bed, is something about "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas": There are some variations in the lyrics. I grew up hearing "Hang a shining star upon the highest bough" at the high point in the final stanza. I was happy to find the alternative "Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow" in the Ella Fitzgerald rendition, and even happier to discover later on that this meatier and more melancholy version of the song was the authentic one from "Meet me in St. Louis". It turns out that the bowdlerized "shining star"version was created especially for Frank Sinatra, who wanted to record the song but needed it to be injected with holiday cheer first. But the kicker is that the good sad version is itself a toned-down version of the songwriter's original truly grim creation, which began:
Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last ...
Judy Garland refused to sing it that way.
A Salt Hygrometer
19 hours ago
6 comments:
Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last ...
What's this? No link to those astonishing lyrics?! Stingy old so-and-so!
Forgot to check the follow-up box.
Sorry! It would have been so easy to embed a link to the WiPe article on the song, as I have now done.
May I point out that (as I understand it) "your last" refers not to your last Christmas but to your last merry Christmas; still astonishing, though.
This song makes sense to me now. I'd always been uneasy with "have yourself a merry little Christmas", it sounded kind of patronising.
The song occurs at a very sad moment in the movie, when the Judy Garland character is trying to console her younger sister about the fact that the family is about to relocate far away from the only home they have ever known. Very poignant, because the big sister singing the song is terribly sad about it herself.
The WiPe page that I linked to has now been changed, so that the original grim version is not given in its entirety. Too bad. I think I remember the first half:
Have yourself a merry little Christmas,
It may be your last.
Next year we will all be living in the past.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas,
Pop that champagne cork.
Next year we will all be living in New York.
The second half was essentially the same as the canonical Judy Garland version, as I recall.
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