National Christmas Tree Lighting 2022 (White Rose. Entertainment, National Park Service, CBS-TV, aired December 11, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 my husband Charles and I stumbled on an engaging TV special from Washington, D.C. centered around the 100th annual lighting of the National Christmas Tree. This is a tradition different from the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree lighting in New York City (which was already done in a special on another network, NBC). One thing I missed was the actual lighting of the tree – I had expected the tree lighting to be at the end of the show like the New York event, but it came at the beginning and I was busy serving our dinner to be watching when it actually happened. My husband Charles reported that it was quite spectacular: the tree was totally invisible – not even a black shadow or outline – until President Joe Biden and his wife Jill hit the switch and the tree lit up. (I just watched it myself on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5l3d6dYp2s.) The musical portion of the program began promisingly with Shania Twain singing “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” following which host L. L. Cool J. introduced the Bidens (and gladdened my heart by pronouncing the “t” in “often,” a long-running in-joke between me and Charles) as the band, headed by a conductor of indeterminate gender who reminded Charles of singer Sinéad O’Connor, played an uptempo swing version of “Jingle Bells” to accompany the actual tree-lighting ceremony. (Technically last night was only the 99th anniversary – the tradition began with President Calvin Coolidge in December 1923 – but last night’s ceremony was the 100th time it’s actually happened.)

After the tree got lit the next performer was Andy Grammer doing a modern-day dance version of “The Little Drummer Boy,” credited to Katherine Davis but actually an old German folk carol which the Trapp Family Singers (the real ones, not the ersatz ones depicted in the play and film The Sound of Music) recorded on their Christmas album. Grammar’s version was in such strict tempo I jokingly sang along, “I have no gift to bring, ba-rum-pum-pum-pum/Just have a drum machine, ba-rum-pum-pum” – though that was being more than a bit unfair to the actual live drummer with the U.S. Marine Band, “The President’s Own,” as it’s been called since the 1880’s when John Philip Sousa led it. Next was Yolanda Adams, introduced as the greatest living gospel singer (with which I’d disagree; she’s a quite good singer but nothing she’s recorded, at least that I’ve heard, matches the sheer righteous power of Mandisa’s “Unfinished”), doing a version of “Silent Night.” The good news is she did all three verses; the bad news is that she sang the first two choruses almost totally straight, and only in the last verse did she finally start ornamenting and “worrying” the notes in the manner of a true gospel singer. Then came The Estefans – consisting ot mother Gloria and two of her kids, a young girl who could sing and a young boy who couldn’t, doing an O.K. but rather treacly song called “Thankful.” Afterwards white British soul singer Joss Stone came on with a song called “What Christmas Means to Me” that was one of the most powerful and impassioned pieces on the program, following which a woman named Ariana DeBose, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, did a better-than-average version of “What Child Is This?,” a.k.a. “Greensleeves,” though I couldn’t help but wish she’d had a soprano saxophonist in her band playing some of John Coltrane’s licks from his version of “Greensleeves.”

Afterwards The Estefans returned for one of the most fun parts of the night, a medley of The Beach Boys’ “Little Saint Nick” and Chuck Berry’s “Run, Rudolph, Run” (compositionally credited to Johnny Marks, who wrote the original “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” but almost certainly with heavy input from Berry himself). Then Andy Grammer returned for a version of Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song” that was acceptable but wasn’t going to make anybody forget the versions by Tormé himself or Nat “King” Cole, who had the hit on it. After that Shania Twain came back with a version of the old Phil Spector/Darlene Love hit “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” of which Charles said that even at her current age – 81 – Darlene Love could probably out-sing her. (That was pretty much our reaction to the whole thing: we enjoyed the modern-day performers but they were hardly in the same league as the legendary artists who introduced these songsin the first place, and as good as it was Yolanda Adams’ “Silent Night” was hardly competitive with Big Maybelle’s or Baby Washington’s.) Then came Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to have that post, introducing President Biden one more time for an anodyne little statement about his hopes for national unity and his optimism about America’s future. The closing number was a surprisingly slow and reverential version of “Joy to the World” sung as a duet by Yolanda Adams and Ariana DeBose, a good way to end one of the myriad hour-long Christmas celebrations we’re going to be getting on TV between now and December 25. Overall I liked the program even though all those songs have been done better elsewhere.