Someday at Christmas

Tim Woodcock writes... Though I had heard the Stevie Wonder song “Someday at Christmas” before, I didn’t really pay it much attention until I heard it on “the Uncle Lanny mix” about 20 years. Let me explain. Uncle Lanny is my wife’s uncle who lives in the Boston area; 20 years back, he gave us a CD, burned from his computer, of Christmas music. In my immediate family, it’s become a tradition of many years standing to start Advent, the countdown to Christmas, by listening to this CD (although nowadays the music is organized as a Spotify playlist).

 

It starts with Nat King Cole singing about chestnuts roasting over an open fire, then Elvis Presley is experiencing a Blue Christmas – standard stuff but it’s a tastefully curated mix of Christmas hits. The song that always catches my ear, the song that always makes me catch my breath, is Stevie Wonder’s version of “Some Day at Christmas.”

The song begins this way:

Someday at Christmas men won't be boys

Playing with bombs like kids play with toys

One warm December, our hearts will see

A world where men are free.

Someday at Christmas there'll be no wars

When we have learned what Christmas is for

When we have found what life's really worth --

There'll be peace on earth.

To my ears, there are few things better, sweeter, truer, more expressive than the voice of Stevie Wonder in his prime. This particular song was recorded pretty early in Wonder’s long career. Although he was just 17 when he made this beautifully world-weary recording, Wonder’s prodigious talent was such that he’d been recording and touring for six years already.

The Jackson Five recorded the song in 1970, adding to its popularity, but much of the credit for the beauty of “Someday at Christmas,” must go to the two songwriters: Bryan Miller and Ron Wells, reliable hitmakers for the Motown record label.

Miler and Wells’ simple-sounding lyrics really do bear some analysis.

Someday at Christmas men won't be boys
Playing with bombs like kids play with toys
One warm December our hearts will see
A world where men are free

Someday at Christmas there'll be no wars
When we have learned what Christmas is for
When we have found what life's really worth
There'll be peace on earth.

I find it impossible to listen to those words in December 2023 and not feel the weight of the situations in Ukraine and Russia, and Israel and Palestine. These wars are based on intractable, inter-generational problems, they are wars that could easily spread to other territories. Don’t we urgently need to hear these lyrics? Don’t we need to force ourselves to imagine that “Someday at Christmas, men won't be boys / playing with bombs like kids play with toys”?

The season of Advent is about the birth of the “Prince of Peace.” It is about angels blessing humanity with a wish for “Peace on Earth and Goodwill Toward All Men.” So, I think it follows that - given the world is becoming more war-like, not less, right now - we collectively need to put some serious work into envisioning what peace on earth looks like.

I’ve no idea how in practical terms peace begin to emerge out of the Middle East right now. But we need to use our dollars and our time to support people and organizations who know how to de-escalate conflicts. Furthermore, we desperately need to empower people who can sketch out a compelling vision for peace time, something that allows the warring factions to get some small portion of what they want, enough progress to broker a peace deal, and to allow people to live again as ordinary humans.

We need to balance the political against the personal and discern what can change and what we can’t. As a phrase from the Quaker tradition puts it, can we “remove the roots and seeds of war by forming an atmosphere of life that makes war unthinkable?”

Part of what I love about the Stevie Wonder song is how the message of the lyrics is reinforced harmonically. There is a key change midway through the song that echoes the escalating sense of hope, a swelling of major-key notes, and yet the musically subdued refrain – the “maybe not” phrase highlighted below – keeps on pulling us back to a grounded sense of realism.

Someday at Christmas there'll be no tears
When all men are equal and no man has fears
One shining moment one prayer away
From our world today

Someday all our dreams will come to be
Someday in a world where men are free
Maybe not in time for you and me
But someday at Christmastime.

In other words, Stevie Wonder and the songwriters are saying: That’s a lovely sentiment, but it may never happen. There won’t be a time without war in my lifetime, nor in your lifetime. There’s an ambivalence and a melancholy, a harsh sense of reality that pierces the fantasy. And it’s that tension between fantasy and reality that makes this such an extraordinary Christmas song.

I’ve listened to this song many times and keep coming back to this point: Does “some day” mean a specific day quite soon or is “someday” –  a single word – a vague abstraction, like “someone” or “something”? When you hear it sung, it is far from clear.

As the lyrics are written, however, it is as one word, the latter more abstract meaning.

The songwriters – one of whom is Jewish – seem to have in mind the prophet Isaiah, and the anticipation of a new sustained age of peace. As we heard yesterday over the speakers at the start of the day, Isaiah gives us a famous metaphor for peace and a future time of “no tears”:

In that day the wolf and the lamb will live together;

the leopard will lie down with the baby goat.

The calf and the yearling will be safe with the lion,

and a little child will lead them all.

The phrase “someday at Christmas” stands in for the tantalizing idea that the reign of the Messiah is near, but never quite here.

Furthermore, the song, which does not invoke God at all, seems also to echo the one of very oldest songs in Christian history, “O come, O come, Immanuel.”

O come, O come, Immanuel and ransom captive Israel

that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Immanuel shall come to you, O Israel.

That song is documented back as early as the 8th century, and there’s good reason to think it existed in other forms before that. In the modernized version, it ends:

O come, O King of nations, bind in one the hearts of all mankind.

Bid all our sad divisions cease and be yourself our King of Peace.

May we make these ideas our guiding light -- knowing that we may never reach them, but that they will keep us on the right track as we strive to create a better world.

(This blog post is adapted from a Wednesday chaplaincy talk given as part of my job).