What Child Is This Anyway?
For Christmas 2003, my parents bought my sister and I an electric keyboard. For a few years, this keyboard sat to the right of our home’s tall front window, a drafty old house in a small Saskatchewan town, population 8,000. For the uninitiated, Saskatchewan is the central prairie province in Canada, infamous for its flatness, wheat fields, and desolate winters. My parents were young and poor, although my sister and I didn’t fully know this at the time, and an electric keyboard was a big step up from practicing piano at the local church. We were ecstatic. The keyboard was made of a matte silver plastic (we thought it was so modern) and swayed back and forth a little if you played too enthusiastically. The keys were light and made an audible plastic thunk each time you’d press one.
To us, the best part of this keyboard was the preset sounds and songs that were stored on its primitive computer. A touch of a button and “Für Elise” would float out of the speakers as if I was a young prodigy, of which I assuredly was not. My favourite pre-set song on this keyboard was “Greensleeves.” I would play it over and over, its haunting melody washing over me and bringing up a mysterious feeling. It was a foggy nostalgia, with the qualities of candlelight and twisting vines and rabbit dens and musty root cellars and distant stars at night. This was a bizarre experience for an 8-year old to have, to feel nostalgia for things that I had barely experienced, or maybe remembered once from a dream. The tune sounded familiar to me, but it took me another Christmas season to realize that it was the same as the carol “What Child is This?” The lyrics of this carol were apparently penned in 1865 to the original tune of Greensleeves, which was a traditional folk song dating back to late 16th century England. At the time, however, all I knew was that this keyboard tune and the associated Christmas carol would bring up this nostalgia-type feeling without fail. The feeling seemed to be most distinct in the winter at night, when walking down a snowy street lit by only dim street lamps, the yellow glow and domestic scene through a neighbours window, and the occasional Christmas lights. It was a stillness and mournfulness, yet peacefulness too. It was warm yet clear. I called this feeling “The Creepy Christmas Feeling” when trying to describe it as an adult to my partner while explaining my fondness for the more melancholy of Christmas songs versus the ‘merry and bright’ ones.
By Christmas 2006, my family had left Saskatchewan to move to a mid-sized city in British Columbia (B.C.), so my Dad could go back to school. B.C. was warmer, damper, and snow on Christmas was never a guarantee. Around this time, we had a family friend who lived in Vancouver who was close to the 2000s indie scene. If he thought an album was particularly notable, my Dad would receive a burned CD with the name scrawled on in sharpie. One of these was Seven Swans, which captured our family’s heart that Christmas. By the next year, we discovered that Sufjan Stevens (at which time we pronounced “Suff-Jan” with a hard J) actually had a whole Christmas album full of endearing, goofy, and melancholy Christmas songs. There were original songs and the classic carols and hymns we had heard at church. This album produced The Creepy Christmas Feeling in me without fail, and I would listen to nearly nothing else at Christmas time (for the record, this is still true). If it did snow on Christmas in B.C., The Creepy Christmas Feeling was amplified. Add in “What Child is This Anyway?” and I was swept back to my childhood in the dark freezing prairie, warm inside and playing Greensleeves on the keyboard underneath the front window. I also loved the notion of a shepherd coming to visit baby Jesus in the manger, and scoffing “What child is this, anyway.” From a church background, it was hilarious to imagine someone being distinctly unimpressed by Jesus. As I got older, and my relationship to Christianity shifted, fell apart, and came back together in a new way, “What Child is This Anyway?” sounded less comical to me and more profound. It echoed a feeling of having a complicated relationship with the Universe, with God, whichever. It reflected my grief of losing the rosy perfection of childhood and coming into the messiness and duress of adolescence and adulthood.
The arrangement itself coupled my rumination on growing up to The Creepy Christmas Feeling, with its familiar Greensleeves tune. It begins with a low beating drum, bass, and banjo, with hazy improvised guitar (I think, I can’t tell) floating over the top. Just as soon as the song gets going, it suddenly becomes quiet as Sufjan sings the first verse, with only acoustic guitar and piano. As the song picks up again, it shifts back and forth between a steady beating verse and a more syncopated open swirling chorus. Then, the steady beating swells and gets stronger and stronger before stopping, letting Sufjan sing the last verse alone with an organ. Quiet, almost as if through a telephone. The instrumentals pick up again and start to swirl around. Wordless harmonies create a repetitive chorus over top of the building chaos, still grounded by the pulsing drum. This builds to a low crest, like coming over the rise of a hill, until the drum slowly stops and the song unravels. Crisp piano trills bridge the move into silence, petering out and echoing like twinkling stars in a night sky.
Something about this song speaks to me: the oscillation between the earthy steady verses, the semi-chaotic layered choruses, and the moments of quietness and tranquility. It captures best the feelings I have at Christmas time. Not only The Creepy Christmas Feeling, but also the twinning of the quiet moments of serenity with the anxious pacing and moderate disappointment inherent to adulthood. To some degree, it speaks to me about the paradox of being human: so lowly and earthly, and yet transcendent and divine. “Why lies He in such mean estate; Where ox and ass are feeding?” the carol asks. Jesus arrives in such humble conditions because he is human, as we are. Somehow, it’s a comforting notion to me on Christmas, at the winter solstice, when things are dark and cold. When The Creepy Christmas Feeling is strongest.
By Emily Enns