ALAN writes:

One of your readers wrote that Christmas music can inspire memories of serenity and beauty. Indeed it can.

Can you stand a memory from an America that no longer exists?  I’ll wager I’m the only one among your readers who remembers the singer Marion Worth and the gem of a Christmas song that she recorded more than fifty years ago. I fell in love with it in the winter of 1962-’63 and still have the 45-rpm recording on the Columbia records label. Marion Worth sang country music, but “Shake Me I Rattle (Squeeze Me I Cry)” was a timeless Christmas story-song about a little girl and the dolly she admires in a toyshop window, evoking the memory of an identical scene recalled by the singer from her own girlhood.  Marion Worth’s voice and handling of the lyric are perfect.

What richly-detailed scenes were conjured in my imagination when I first heard “Shake Me I Rattle” on local AM radio that winter:  The small town square, the snowflakes falling, and the little girl at the toyshop window. It sounded and felt just right fifty years ago. It still does.

And it reminds me of my own mother’s memory of her childhood Christmases in the 1920s when she was happy to receive the gift of a doll or an orange in her Christmas stocking. Imagine that….in today’s culture of excess. Americans had their heads on straight in those years when they still understood balance, form, proportion, and perspective. Timeless songs like “Shake Me I Rattle” are reminders of that better time and place and the people who made them that way.

May I wish you a Merry Christmas and all the serenity you can handle.

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