Effervescent Christmas

This ad appeared in the Boston Globe during the Christmas shopping season of 1919. Note the enticement to become consumers rather than producers of music.

The assembly hall at Phillips Exeter Academy is usually the site of serious, sometimes grim, subjects: global warming, war, poverty, the Supreme Court.

Last Friday, one of our music teachers, Eric Sinclair, got up on stage and sang Christmas carols.

This assembly used to be an annual event, but it hadn’t happened for long enough that the current students had never experienced it. I never heard an explanation for why it was stopped, but I’ve assumed that, in the spirit of diversity and inclusion, we had decided that the “harm” it might do to people who don’t celebrate Christmas was more important than the “collective effervescence” it inspires among those who know the words to the songs.

Was this experience of joining together with others in song more common before Netflix and doom scrolling? Before we traded in our pianos for record-players? Before we all had our own Spotify playlists and air-buds? Did we know the words to more of the same songs and sit around the fire or the piano and sing together?

Christmas and Christmas songs seem to be one of the few things that still permeate our national culture down through the generations. After the assembly, Eric said he wasn’t sure this youngest generation would know the words. They did.

They belted out “Deck the Halls,” and “”Jingle Bells,” and when Eric sang “had a very shiny nose,” they even knew to shout back: “like a light bulb!”

Adam Grant guessed that the numbers of depressed Americans quadruped during COVID quarantine because we were being denied “a special kind of joy.”

“Peak happiness,” he said, “lies mostly in collective activity.”

Grant’s NYT op-ed is where I learned the term collective effervescence. “We find our greatest bliss in moments of collective effervescence,” he wrote.

According to my AI friend, Gemini, the term was coined by Emile Durkheim in 1912 and describes the feeling of energy and harmony that people experience when they come together in a group with a shared purpose. It is a joie de vivre that manifests when we share moments with others, such as being in a stadium that erupts in simultaneous applause when a musician returns for an encore performance.

Grant described the feeling more broadly to include “creating together and solving problems together.” He chided Americans for thinking that the pursuit of happiness is a solitary endeavor and called for a “Declaration of Interdependence.”

Unfortunately, the end of pandemic lock-downs didn’t end what the surgeon general calls our loneliness epidemic. And there’s no end in sight.

It seems like every new invention and every social trend has the effect of pushing us away from each other. My parents’ first home was just around the corner from both of my grandparents. Then we moved to the suburbs. By the end of the day on Christmas, nine people will have spent a combined 60 hours driving to our holiday celebrations over the last few days in search of an effervescent Christmas.

I hope we were wrong about the harm these songs might cause.  I can't recall a single religious theme in the lyrics Eric sang. They were all about decking the halls and dashing through snow.  And one song at the end had an inclusive message, about German and British soldiers playing soccer during a Christmas truce in 1914.  The assembly ended with these words: On each end of the rifle we're the same.