I almost missed Christmas this year. Americans are used to an inundation of Christmas signs—lights, wreaths, fake snow in California and real snow in New York, trees in the windows, Christmas soundtracks in every store—right after Thanksgiving. If it weren’t for the psychedelic lights in the piazza, your uninitiated tourist, visiting Matera between December 1 and January 12, might think that Matera decided to cancel Christmas that year. Slowly, I learned to recognize the signs that Christmas was coming, though for the first two weeks I hummed “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” with a sense of irony.
Take a look in the Five and Ten, glistening once again, goes the song. Take a look in the tabacchi, and it’s not with candy canes and silver lanes aglow. (Although, one day I was standing in the check-out line at one of the smaller supermarkets when I saw a tub of candy canes. I was so shocked that I started coughing. Upon closer inspection, I found that the tub held candy canes in every flavor except peppermint.) Instead of Rudolph, Santa, and Frosty, there was La Befana, the traditional Christmas dispenser of treats and jollity. Although Italians have adopted the anglophone custom of Santa Claus, I suspect that they are mystified by this big, avuncular, old man. And I am just as mystified by the sight of Christmas trees decked, not with gingerbread men and glass globes, but with witches on broomsticks.
I found two Santa Clauses this Christmas season, both the figures that start singing when you walk by. I grew to be quite fond of the Santa Claus outside Morelli’s Emporium on Via Margherita. I used to take that street just to hear a hearty ho-ho and the first two lines of “Jingle Bells.”
The Materan Christmas song repertoire seems to consist of two tunes, the first verse of “Jingle Bells” and “Tu scendi dalle stelle” (You came down from the stars), a carol traditionally sung by shepherds. In fact, if it had not been for the Santa Claus outside Morrelli’s Emporium, and a rather hardy old shepherd who roamed the streets, wailing on his zampogna (bagpipes), Matera would have been silent during that most sonorous of seasons. I know that while in the U.S. I griped about the Christmas tunes played ad nausea wherever there was a radio, but it was an eerie experience to go Christmas shopping without the accompaniment of “Jingle Bell Rock,” “Let it Snow,” and “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.” In America, the air thrums with music and good cheer. In Matera, the shop owners have to pay an association (SIAE, Società italiana degli autori ed editori) whenever they play music in their shops, even radio music—a veritable case of the Grinch who stole Christmas.
I tried to compensate for the lack of festive music by sharing Christmas songs with my students. I gave them the texts, with key words missing, and asked them to fill-in the blanks. Such was my determination to spread Christmas cheer that I recklessly played “I’ll be home for Christmas” and “Have yourself a merry little Christmas,” songs that are better not heard 3,000 miles away from home. But if the Materan streets and shops were curiously silent, the students needed little encouragement to start singing. I cannot imagine a class of American high schoolers spontaneously breaking out into song. I will never forget the day that I played Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” for one of my beginning classes. They asked me to play it again so that they could learn the words, whereupon they linked arms and sang, every student. The earnestness with which they braved the sustained note in “may your days be merry and briiiiiiiiiiight,” brought a lump to my throat. I have no doubt that night’s snowfall—a miraculous event in Matera, where, so they tell me, it never snows—was due to the five times that we sang “White Christmas.” I do hope that next Christmas Bing’s song surfaces in the Materan repertoire.
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