Craig Bennett's Thanksgiving Holds Treasured Memories, Beautiful Music

* Craig H. Bennett holds degrees from Ursinus College and The Johns Hopkins University and is retired from the two-year college faculty of Valley Forge Military Academy and College. Prior to that he taught English in the Boyertown Area School District. He is the author of Nights on the Mountain and More Things in Heaven and Earth available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and the Firefly bookstore, Kutztown, PA. 

Thanksgiving. Despite the well-known story of its origins and the various non-commercial traditions that have grown up around it, what the holiday has come to mean for most people is the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. And the culmination of that period of frantic searching, purchasing, and (if you have young children) concealment is, of course, the “biggie” of American holidays, Christmas.

One of the things for which I’ve been most thankful since my early adolescence is music. The role that music has played in my own life has probably been the major influence in providing me with both opportunities and rewards I never imagined I would have before I began to play an instrument. My gratitude for the chance to become actively involved in music is immeasurable.

The importance of music to human cultures all over the planet and throughout time would make for a very long discussion. But in our own culture, one of the most significant sources of musical inspiration has always been religion—and the most important holiday in Christianity has come to be Christmas. Just as I’ve always liked and enjoyed Christmas, I’ve always liked and enjoyed Christmas music. Thanksgiving marks the first time since the preceding December when we begin to hear it—in stores, on the radio, and, if we’re so equipped, on our own home stereo systems. And, as trite as it may seem, one of my most favorite musical genres is Christmas music.

The terrific charge of nostalgia they bear undoubtedly has something to do with it, but the traditional carols we hear during the Christmas season are, to me, some of the most beautiful music ever composed. And how characteristic of the season that a piece like “Silent Night,” perhaps the most beautiful and best-loved carol of them all, was composed at the last minute, essentially as an expedient. The church organ in the small Austrian town of Oberndorf was feared to have been damaged by recent flooding; so on Christmas Eve, the young priest who had recently come to Oberndorf hastily composed a poem, which he took to Fraz Gruber, the church’s organist, with the request that Gruber set the lyrics to a melody accompanied by guitar rather than organ. Fortunately, the organist was able to do as the priest requested, and the carol debuted at that evening’s service. The rest, as they say, is history.

At the other end of the Christmas music spectrum we have Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet. Although at the time Easter was a more important holiday in Orthodox Czarist Russia than Christmas and the ballet was based on a story by E.T.A. Hoffman, a German writer of fantasy and Gothic horror, the ballet has become a Christmas favorite comparable to Handel’s Messiah. When my daughter was young, she and I used to go down to Philadelphia at Christmas time, usually for a matinee between Christmas and New Year’s, to see the Pennsylvania Ballet’s annual production of the Nutcracker at the Academy of Music. And I enjoyed it every bit as much as she did, if not more. In fact, not long after she was married and still living in the Washington, D.C. area, she persuaded her husband that they should go to see the National Ballet’s Nutcracker at the Kennedy Center—and told me afterward that, in her estimation, it was a rather humble production compared with what we used to see in Philadelphia.

So, each year come Thanksgiving, I make an hour-and-a-half or so to sit down and listen to my recording of the complete Nutcracker… and I remember. It’s my personal ritual to mark the advent of the Christmas season, always my favorite time of year; and it brings to mind such an indescribably rich trove of recollections of Christmases long gone with people who, themselves, are long gone, but who will remain with me as part of those treasured holiday memories until I, myself, am no longer here. And I’ll spend the remaining days between Thanksgiving and December 25th listening to my own collection of Christmas music and feeling perhaps a little more grateful than usual that I had the great good fortune to be born into a world that has such music to be enjoyed.

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