My Christmas Affair with Robert Goulet

Okay - so you know when there is something that has played such a strong and significant role in your life that it is part of your very fiber? The reconnection with it - or even the memory of it - brings on such a flood of feelings that you simply cannot wrap your head around it? Such is the case with Robert Goulet's "This Christmas I Spend With You".

Every Christmas my mother would bring out our three Christmas albums and they served as the harbinger of a magical month. The first album escapes me, the second was the Nutcracker Suite and Linda, Lisa, and I would dance on our toes with the Sugar Plum Fairy, and then there was Robert Goulet. The jacket was an impressionist style illustration of Robert (I feel I can call him that) in tuxedo against a red background. His hands are folded on his lap and he looked as though he was happily surprised to see that it was me making a grand entrance down a spiral staircase (which we never had) and delighted to learn that he would be my escort to the Christmas party of the season. "Haaaaay!" he seems to be appreciatively saying. (I had a bit of an imagination back then. Never mind that I was 7.) The title track was the first on the album and it began with the happy sounds of violin strings being plucked in that way you heard a lot of back in the 60s. And then the dreamy Robert Goulet singing: Maaaaaaaaaark-this-holidaaaay-Mmmmmark-it wellll. Nooooote-how-perfectleey-rright. It fellllll. Yeeeeeees it's Christmas. But somthinnng-is neeeeew because thiiiiiiiiiis Christmas. I spennnnd-with you". But it wasn't really the fantasy of romance that meant so much to me. My heart was filled with joy at the sound of his voice because Robert Goulet was back and that meant Christmas.

I'll bet I have listened to this album a thousand times in my life. I cannot remember a single Christmas without it in my childhood. Every single note of every single orchestration of every single track is sealed in my brain. I can "hear" the phrasing, the cadence, the vocal styling of every lyric. Every time I hear it, I am back on Sawleaf Street somewhere in the early to mid 60s - walking up and down the street to kill time on Christmas Eve, wishing the hours would speed up. My mother wearing Christmas tree ornaments in her ears (yes - real ones - with the hooks and everything), my dad whistling "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" through his teeth. The cold, crisp California winter air, our beloved homemade Christmas stockings that my darling Auntie Barbara made for us were brought out (my mother yelling at us to take them off our feet!) The tree with the big multi-colored lights (not the teeny twinkly white ones!) that got so hot when you touched them they would burn your fingers, and colored lights across the roof line of all the houses. Christmas Eve, "special bulletin" interruptions on TV with newscasters reporting unidentifiable flying objects - only to learn it was Santa and his reindeer flying all over the world! The one present we got to open on Christmas Eve (always pajamas - a tradition my sisters and I have continued with our own children) and uncountable other random images - some that I can't fully conjure, but are cherished nonetheless. Christmas day was far less memorable than the weeks that led up to it. Not because Christmas morning was a disappointment, it wasn't. But the magical, joyful anticipation that led up to it was over.

I don't know what became of the actual album. Lisa made us a cassette tape of it about 10 years ago but last year I found it on ebay (in cassette form) and shipped it off to some place in Washington where they made 4 copies of it on cd and I gave it to my sisters and my dad for Christmas. Because it cannot possibly be Christmas without Robert Goulet.

I'm listening to it now. And if you want to, you can go to www.robertgoulet.com and click on the blue icon called "Other Robert Goulet Christmas favorites" and hear the entire album. But if it isn't part of your fiber, it will likely not do for you what it does for me. It simply takes me to the Christmas of my youth. And that is where, ultimately, I think our hearts are supposed to be a Christmas. And I hope you all have a song, an ornament, a photograph, a smell, a memory that takes you there.

Next Installment: Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol