Blog 3340 – 12.25.2024
“Merry Christmas, Darling”
One of my all time favorite Christmas songs is “Merry Christmas, Darling” by Karen and Richard Carpenter, The Carpenters. It was originally released as a single 45 RPM on November 22, 1970, my birthday, the year I spent in the Republic of South Vietnam, the year that I turned twenty and ceased being a teenager. It was the year that I married my first darling wife on January second, six days before leaving for Oakland Army Depot for processing to Vietnam, and by my birthday that year I already knew that she had left me for another and was somebody else’s darling for I had not received a letter from her in over three months though I had written her everyday.
It was a particularly disturbing time in my young life, but I lived through it and the beautiful love song was not ruined for me. All too often a broken heart during the holidays ruins the holidays for people as each successive holiday season reminds them of the ghosts of Christmases past. Like Jacob Marley in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, many of us drag around so much baggage from the past that we act as if we are ghosts of and prisoners to it. Focusing only on what went wrong in the past not only robs us of many wonderful memories, but it also taints our future aspirations, still worst of all it casts a dark and dampening shadow on the most important time in our lives – Now.
The lyrics to the first two verses of today’s song are as follows:
My Christmas wishes and dreams for 1970 did not come true as I had hoped. Even though I did get a thirty-day Christmas drop off my year long assignment to Vietnam and was able to be home for Christmas, even so Christmas that year was not what I had hoped it might be. Still as I said, the heartbreak I experienced that year did not ruin the Merry Christmas, Darling song for me nor did it destroy my faith in the spirit of Christmas nor in love itself, himself, herself.
My first name David, I am told, means beloved or darling, so the song title seems like this song was written to me personally. We often suffer disappointments especially hard because we take them personally, yet we miss so many of the great triumphs and joys of life by failing to realize that each and every one of us is truly beloved and darling.
I love the way the Irish in particular use the term “darling” so expansively. In one of my favorite movies, John Wayne’s The Quiet Man, released in 1952, two years into this adventure in time and space for me, even Squire Will Danaher’s hired man refers to his boss by that term of endearment, calling him “Squire, Darlin’.”
And so I say to to the near and the dear and as well to all, “Merry Christmas, Darling.”
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White
Merry Christmas Darling
theencouragingword 