Where the lovelight gleams
It might be a "Hard Candy Christmas," but at least Dolly is honest with you
Listen, I’ve felt better. My respiratory system has made fascinating advances in mucus science over the past week. I’m also working on a special issue for paid Turning Out subscribers, my top movies of the year — coming soon! So, as Christmas barrels into the frame, my attention is divided.
As I brainstormed this week’s issue, one thought stood out in my engooped brain: Dolly Parton really did her big one with “Hard Candy Christmas,” huh?
Honestly, the song used to make me grouchy. As late as college, that high-pitched twang dripping with depression made me think, “What’s your problem, lady?” (I would never address Dolly as “lady” now.) Such a mopey song for such a wonderful time of the year. The only hard candy I was interested in: those little holiday books that came with four rolls of Lifesavers, including a butter rum flavor that felt vaguely menacing.
Today, I commune with that past self and think, “Oh, my sweet baby goon.” The sadness of the season takes up a little more of my space every year. Maybe yours, too. I never thought that I’d have to balance festivity with solitude. And then, of course, there are the horrors. Let nothing you dismay? Say it to my face.
My friend Julia once told me I’m good at saying what I want. I guess Christmas is a time for wish lists. I want a family that doesn’t hurt. I want a partner to share my favorite days with. I’d like to wake up warmer on Dec. 25.
So, I get Dolly now. There’s more honesty in her ode to sugar that can shatter than in most carols. Especially “A Marshmallow World,” which can take a long slide down a short chimney.
It’s got me thinking about how much I appreciate a little darkness in my Christmas songs.
For example, Joni Mitchell’s “River.” “It’s not really a Christmas song,” I once smugly muttered to myself, like an IRS auditor trying to catch a Canadian icon in holiday-specific tax fraud. But at 35? Why, yes. I do wish I had a river I could skate away on.
Likewise, The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” has something to offer. I’ve grown somewhat into its naked unpleasantness, if not its comfort with the F-slur. I’m going to share Hozier’s cover from “Saturday Night Live” this weekend, because this is my newsletter, and I like my Irishmen as long as possible:
I’m drawn to the songs that reflect something recognizable instead of something ideal. Sufjan Stevens, a snowman brought to life by a Wellbutrin-branded scarf, wrote two wistful standards that I love. “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!” is the natural place to start. See how he bends the familiar:
“Silent night/ Holy night/ Silent night/ Nothing feels right.”
Driving to ill-fated family Christmases in my 20s, I always lingered on these lines, which are perfectly ambiguous, like all Sufjan lyrics:
“Can you say what you want?/ Can you say what you want to be?”
Another Sufjan original, “Christmas in the Room,” grasps at the same seasonal realism. “It's just an ordinary day,” he sings. But in execution, this song is more hopeful. The narrator isn’t alone; they have a someone.
“No gifts to give, they're all right here/ Inside our hearts, the glorious cheer/ And in the house, we seek a light/ That comes from what we know inside”
The obvious reading is romantic, but this being the guy who writes valentines to Jesus, you can never be sure. I’ll let it slide.
Even as a hopeful teen — wracked by near-constant anxiety and shame, but hopeful nonetheless! — I gravitated toward stuff like “I Hate Christmas Parties” by Relient K:
“I hope it snows this week/ A snowflake on your cheek/ Would make this Christmas so beautiful/ But that would just bring the pain/ ’Cause things can't stay the same/ These holidays won't be wonderful”
How about “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”? Not if Judy Garland has anything to say about it. The opening lines are obviously magical thinking — a warding spell performed by someone who’s seen fucked-up shit over the course of a calendar year:
“Have yourself a merry little Christmas/ Let your heart be light/ From now on, our troubles will be out of sight”
I’m always struck by the uncertainty around time in the lyrics. The narrator invokes “happy golden days of yore,” because again, they’re dead tired of the aluminum foil days of now. But the song is so noncommittal about better tomorrows:
“Through the years, we all will be together/ If the fates allow”
Gonna start wishing everyone a Happy New Year, If the Fates Allow.
The only artist to rival Judy’s emotion on this song is, of course, Kermit the Frog. Such pain stitched into that green felt. Such horrors held within ping pong ball eyes.
She & Him’s cover comes close, I guess.
There’s a similar tension in “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” — heavy hope that has a damn good reason to exist. For sunlight peeking through storm clouds, we must look to Karen Carpenter’s version, natch. It’s not as instrumentally spare as some renditions, which I like. No need to overdo it. Can a violin well up with tears? These opening strings sure sound like it.
Carpenter just cracks my sternum open with these words, which I think are as beautiful as anything in a hymnal:
“Christmas Eve will find me/ Where the lovelight gleams/ I'll be home for Christmas/ If only in my dreams”
Speaking of hymns, I remember exactly when “O Holy Night” cut to the front of my line of favorites. A couple years after coming out, I went to a Christmas tour featuring several “RuPaul’s Drag Race” queens. Not the place for holiday sincerity, on the whole.
But then Michelle Visage, RuPaul’s longtime sidekick and the show’s “mean” judge, sang “O Holy Night.” Such a dramatic song; real stained glass-and-crushed velvet stuff. Its shadows are tangible.
The stillness in that cramped Red River club struck me. Visage sang words I’d heard all my life but had never really heard, ya know?
“A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices/ For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn”
I think it was the first time I’d felt every part of myself exist in one place. Or at least a couple of parts. The big ones. You know the ones.
I don’t have a nice, neat thesis here. I just listen to these songs, and they sound right. None of them work, really work, if you don’t know that this shit is hard. A lament about a closing brothel has more in common with mangers and magi than “A Marshmallow World.” (Not to get too church boy on you.)
I decided not to expect too much from my Christmas this year, in a neutral, “Choose Your Own Adventure” sort of way. The tree is up. The friends have been hugged. I’m taking care of myself. Might get a little sad, but me? I’ll be just fine.
Like Dolly sings: “I'm barely getting through tomorrow, but still, I won't let sorrow bring me way down.”
It’s winter, and everything is dark, except where the lovelight gleams.
One rad thing
Using “one” loosely this week. Like I said, paid subscribers to the newsletter will get a special issue — my top films of the year — later this week. As an amuse-bouche, here are the performances I loved from movies that missed the cut, whether by a hair or by a whole wig.
Henry Cavill and Alan Ritchson as beefcake Nazi-killers in “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”
Kiernan Shipka, who gave the most chilling horror movie monologue of the decade (really!), in “Longlegs”
Hugh Grant, atheism message board incarnate, in “Heretic”
Kathryn Hunter as a Southern Gothic nightmare beamed in from a bayou planet where alligators are people in “The Front Room”
Catherine O’Hara resurrecting Delia Deetz in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”
Caleb Hearon, supporting character giving lead energy, in “Sweethearts”
Charlie Stover as a kid adventurer with a language of his own in “Riddle of Fire”
Andrew Garfield as the cutest widower in the game in “We Live in Time”
Denzel Washington as Denzel Washington in “Gladiator II”
Manaia Hall as a daffy delinquent in a school for Māori girls in “We Were Dangerous”
Pamela Anderson reborn in “The Last Showgirl”
Danielle Deadwyler, haunted and magnetic, in “The Piano Lesson”
Kieran Culkin giving an unbearable performance I never want to see again in “A Real Pain”
Stephen McKinley Henderson as a veteran journalist with a heroic streak in “Civil War”
Hunter Schaefer as the most relatable “final girl” of the year in “Cuckoo”
Zoe Ziegler as the world’s most unnerving child in “Janet Planet”
Chris Hemsworth, scenery chewer, in “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga”
Ryuji Kosaka as a guileless corporate drone who picked the wrong town to gentrify in “Evil Does Not Exist”
Kathryn Newton as a dimwitted crook in “Abigail”
Jodie Comer doing a funny voice in “The Bikeriders”
Moses Sumney as an unlucky video store clerk in “Maxxxine”
Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd, somehow, in “Saturday Night”
Josh Hartnett as a demented serial killer and #girldad in “Trap”
Reneé Rapp, the only good argument to remake “Mean Girls,” in the musical remake of “Mean Girls”
Kong, gorilla zaddy forever, in “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire”
Mason Alexander Park as the only person on a queer ranch with whom you’d want to spend more than five minutes in “National Anthem”
John Early at his wit’s end in “Stress Positions”
Dakota Johnson, whose mom was researching spiders in the Amazon right before she died, in “Madame Web”
Outbound messages
Pantone be damned. Green was the color of 2024, GQ says, from “Brat” to “The Substance” to “Wicked.”
“That's the thing about green, and perhaps the defining characteristic of all the green that we've been confronted with this year, while we're being told it's gross and ugly, it's actually alluring.”
…
This New York Times story about Daniel Stern (irresistibly headlined “Marv From ‘Home Alone’ Has a New Calling Card: Tangerines and Sculpture”) is the ideal read on Christmas Eve. Stern says he hasn’t seen “Home Alone” since 1990! I don’t know if I believe him. Read the story here.
Have a good one, y’all.
