Twelfth Day of “Days of A Christmas Carol Past”
The Final Installment, For This Year, Anyway
As there are twelve days of Christmas, so I will end on the twelfth installment of “Days of Christmas Carol Past”. My thirty year journey with stage adaptations of the tale of Scrooge, Tiny Tim, and Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet-To-Come began when I auditioned for my dad in that bright rehearsal room that Milwaukee day in September, 1976. It appears to have ended on a cold evening in December, 2006, when my husband, daughter and I went out to dinner after her last performance as Tiny Tim.
The other role my daughter played in that 2006 production was Want, a role I played thirty years before. But, as you have seen if you read the installment before this one, my perhaps a bit indulgent showcase of my daughter’s eventful childhood with more photos than I usually include, I tried to make her life free of the kind of emotional want I felt growing up with an emotionally distant mother.
Soon after my daughter’s last “Carol”, our family’s journey would take another turn as we welcomed our son, and all the new adventures we had with him and his involvement in sports, Scouts, a Lego club at our library, the school band, and, now and then, a stage performance.
When my son was eight years old, a community theater group in our little Pennsylvania town was presenting a Christmas “Spectacular”, featuring any local talent that wished to sing and dance onstage. My daughter and I sang a duet of “Light in the Stable”, as I played guitar. My son sang several songs with a group of children.
One of the songs was beautiful and tugged at my heart, especially when my son sang his one solo line. He stepped up to the microphone and tentatively sang, “Let us love ‘till we die…” That line, so stark and impactful out of the mouth of an eight-year-old boy, was followed by the entire children’s chorus singing “…and God bless us, everyone!” How familiar!
In fact, “God Bless Us, Everyone” is the name of the song, written by Alan Menken and Lynn Ahrens for the 1994 stage musical called, you guessed it, A Christmas Carol. I had no idea this song would be a part of the show when my son decided to sing in it. I had never seen, or heard any songs from, the new musical version of “Carol” that was staged in New York City, and made into a film in 2004.
So, quite unexpectedly, my son carried on the family tradition of performing a version of Dicken’s well-known Christmas tale, though it was only one song. However, this particular song that he and the other children sang together is, by itself, a summation of the entire message of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. And so, I will end this series with a lyric video of the song with a title that is the same as the very last words of Dickens’ book:
With that, I wish everyone reading this a very Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and, I must say it, God bless us, everyone!
