When you grow up, Christmas is all about what your parents make of it and as an adult sometimes you forget that not everyone has the same shared-memories of what makes or breaks Christmas.

For me growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, the claymation “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer,” “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and the cartoon version of “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” were the touchstones that defined the season.  And having parents who grew up in the 40’s and 50’s, those “must-sees” where augmented with the must-hears of “Sing along with Mitch” and Bing Crosby’s album, “White Christmas.”

And those are things that can still put me in a Christmas mood.  (That and my grandmother’s white feather wreath which I used to think was ugly and now that it’s mine…and actually IS ugly and bedraggled and somehow still shedding feathers 50 years after it was purchased…looks kinda purdy to me.  And Christmasy.)

Anyway, because I’d grown up listening to the music my mom would play throughout the season, when my friend Desma asked me to sing Mele Kalikimaka at the concert the Choral Society is putting on tonight at the Carmel Mission, I assumed everyone would know what the HECK I was doing dolled up in a santa hat and a holly bow-tie, crooning away.

I assumed wrong.

click here to listen to Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters singing Mele Kalikimaka

Still, I’m having a good time doing it, even if half the audience is probably at a loss for what’s going on.  The “Andrew’s Sisters” are all decked out in hula skirts and to ensure our humiliation, we all do a hula together during the instrumental break.  (Desma said to me last night that she doesn’t want it to get too campy and I thought, “Too late!”)

Don’t ya wish you were there?

Like most groups in small towns, the Choral Society does community outreach in addition to actual concerts so I performed Mele Kalikimaka for the first time on Thursday at a retirement facility in Monterey.  And it’s funny what becomes a memory…sometimes it’s NOT what you think it will be.

For me, the memory of the song at that performance will not be the actual singing of it, but rather me trying to figure out how to get to the back of the room for my quick-change when the aisles were blocked with walkers and wheelchairs.

Now, my grandmother always said I shouldn’t make fun of old people ’cause one day, if I’m lucky, I’ll be there too.

HOWEVER…

…this morning I had a performance with my jazz group, Junction68, over in a retirement village in Salinas that topped the walker-filled room in Monterey.  These people were quite nice, and most of the one’s who stayed awake through it SEEMED to enjoy it.  (Or maybe it was the medication the nurses kept passing out to the residents while we were singing that they enjoyed.)  Some of  them were into the music enough to sing along with us, or at least applaud at appropriate times, but one old guy in the front row was there with his wife and, boy, he was hungry.

How do I know that?  ‘Cause he kept saying it loudly to his wife after we’d finish a song.  And before we’d start the next one, he’d say, “Oh for God’s sake!” and look at his watch.

Man, I keep laughing every time I think of it…that old guy made my day.  The things I get myself into.