Oh Holy Night

I can’t sing it. Not really. I can’t sing it the way I hear it in my heart. Echoes of my mother’s beautiful voice. Echoes of my father’s beautiful voice. Both combined - wrapped in a hazy Christmas glow from childhood. Logs crackling in the fireplace. Electric candles glowing in the windows of our two story colonial. Flames from wax tapers surrounded by glass hurricanes flickering on the mantlepiece. And voices. Lovely voices singing Oh Holy Night.
When my grandmother was lying in an ICU bed at the holidays some three decades ago, we gathered around her. Gagee was in a coma, on a ventilator. A little green light glowed every time she took a breath on her own. We spoke to her, encouraging her to breathe for herself, again and again. Daughter and granddaughters, we stood at her bedside and softly sang Oh Holy Night. We didn’t realize that the nurses at their station could hear us. That it brought them to tears, as it does me in the remembering. The green light glowed more often. Gagee eventually recovered after a very long recuperation. We called her our miracle.
Oh Holy Night is woven through my childhood and adulthood. Very few recordings of it can stand comparison to such vivid and sentiment laden memories. But Josh Groban’s rendition from his 2002 album “Josh Groban in Concert” is quite wonderful. I don’t own the CD, but I did download the song from iTunes for just 99 cents! I hope you enjoy it as well.