Where the Love-light Gleams

I'll be home for Christmas;
You can count on me
Please have snow and mistletoe
And presents on the tree.

Christmas Eve will find me
Where the love-light gleams.
I'll be home for Christmas
If only in my dreams.

As I have averred many times in this and other public spaces, I am atheist, but I was baptized and raised Catholic. Though I no longer care for the "reason" for the season, I have a whole childhood's worth of Christmas memories and that magical feeling brought on by the belief that a jolly, fat, bearded man in a bright red suit was going to come down our chimney — and somehow extract himself from our furnace — and spray toys all around our living room without making the slightest of sounds. As I grew older and came to my understanding of things, Christmas became, for me, all about our family being together, feasting on things we feasted on only at that time of year, and everyone staying over and awake until the wee hours, talking, snacking, joking, and playing.

At age 19 I spent my first Christmas in the United States Air Force, my first Christmas Eve away from home. I was in the third week of basic training. It was the worst night of my life to that point, and the special, "holiday liberty" call home certainly didn't make anything better.

It wasn't until much more recently — since our nation sent troops to the Middle East to fight the difficult wars of my generation — that the weight of the words to the song above hit me fully.

It takes knowing of the time that the song was originally written for one to understand why it was written, as it is told from the point of view of a soldier fighting overseas in World War II, and longing to be home among everything and everyone that made Christmas memories. At first it sounds like a promise, but we then realize it's only an ironic, lonesome, heart-felt, homesick wish. I can only imagine the tears the song evoked in the 1940s, in soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, and their families back home.

It was years ago that I suddenly understood the meaning of the song, that I realized I had lived it in my own way. Now when I hear it played, I can feel the heartache of every military member, every military mom and dad and younger sibling, every child or parent far-removed from family, from home, for any reason.

Then that final line brings to me the sad reality of circumstance. And to tears.

Merry Christmas, everyone, whatever those words mean to you. May you be with everyone you wish to be with, no dreaming necessary.



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