A Long December

Steve Miller said it; you’ve got to go through hell before you get to heaven.   Or maybe it was Saint Augustine.

December ends in Christmas, of course – the most joyous time of the year, for those of us who believe, or who merely want it to be joyous whatever it takes (and I’m firmly in both camps).  And yet it starts so hard; the days collapse inward to the shortest days of the year.  The dark reaches out to get you earlier and earlier every day, engulfing the afternoon and eating up the parts of the day you don’t owe to The Man.  It’s fraught with symbolism, all of it (save Christmas) tied up in mythological angst.

And it’s the part before Christmas I think of when I hear this song:

It’s Maria McKee, formerly of Lone Justice – one of my favorite no-hit wonders of the eighties.  If anything, her solo career was shorter and less successful.

And yet this song infiltrates me every year about this time.  I’ve written in the past about songs that are inextricably tied  to things in my mind; places and times and moments.  “Breathe” is always December 16-20 for me; the striking, eloquent sadness; the wondering stare into the beautiful abyss.
Part of it is the guitar part, by Richard Thompson.  In some ways, this song is one of the most ingenious bits of guitar in Thompson’s ingenuity-clogged forty-year career as the world’s greatest living guitar player.  Elegantly jagged, beautiful and yet disturbing in its almost random harshness, it descends on you like a snow squall engulfing the aurora borealis.

Soon it’ll give way to the Christmas carols, the Hallelujah Chorus, Auld Lang Syne, just as the cold will fall before the apple cider and the lefse and the cocoa, just as sin and decay fall before redemption.

And yet Christmas wouldn’t be as hopeful but for the dark, the dread and the cold that it contrasts with.