Musical Memories
It was one of those little metal cylinders. You know the ones: at various intervals a tab sticks out. When it slowly turns on its axis the tabs collide with and then release the metal spring ‘fingers’ pressed against the cylinder’s face. This release produces a shimmery, bell-like tone.
A music box.
Mine was tucked into the back corner of the pale yellow plastic church we put on display during the holiday season. The church had a steeple, fancy windows on three sides and a light that shone from the inside. Wind up the music box with the key hanging from the back and it would play a chimey “Silent Night”.
People carry with them lots of memories of holidays gone by. The year your mom hung that shabby but oh-so-endearing school project wreath of yours on the front door (you were so proud). That unexpectedly cool gift from your Uncle Irving. Maybe it was the time your older brother got caught fooling with the presents underneath mom and dad’s bed. Boy, did he get it (sibling schadenfraude rules when you’re a little kid). Or…was food involved? Perhaps your Grandmother making her trademark pies, loved by the entire family.
While olfactory cues surely provide strong links back to memory, I personally have to go with music. That music box in the church, “Linus and Lucy”, “Carol of the Bells”, the songs practiced at an old girlfriend’s hand bell rehearsal; they all point back to a time when good will toward men was more than a marketing slogan.
This is not to say that all musical memories of this time of year are purely nostalgia-laden. In fact, every year I make a point to seek out one new recording of holiday music. Though this is an obvious instance of intentional consumerism, it feels like part of the buffer I’ve set up against what is truly a commercial hijacking of the season (”It’s run by a big eastern syndicate, you know”…Man, that Charles Schultz was a genius.) I may not want to hear an easy-listening rendition of “Deck The Halls” at the grocery store three weeks before Thanksgiving, but I don’t mind a bluegrass version of “Joy To The World” while wrapping presents.
This is the true power of musical memories: they can draw out all of your ideas about what is good in the season. The year may have been a tough one, with the perception that you’re falling toward and through the holiday season, but put on this music and the combined weight of decades of positives: food, surprise, love and family…come rushing to the foreground. The outer world can conspire to whitewash and co-opt the true meaning in things but, in actuality, we have that meaning locked inside ourselves.
I don’t know what happened to our little plastic church, but I think about it every year right around this time. No matter what has come to pass over the past twelve months, those plinky little notes come back to calm my soul.
At least for a little while.
Originally published in December 2005. Copyright © 2005 Hot Psychology Magazine. All rights reserved.