Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons user Mstyslav Chernov under CC BY-SA 3.0
I’m sitting in a prime window-adjacent, ever-so-lightly cushioned seat at Toronto’s airport, in hour four of my layover, eagerly anticipating my return to Calgary for Christmas (and just a little anxious that there are no outlets in sight). While I charge my phone at the cost of my computer’s juice, I nonetheless fail to resist the siren call of the handful of fresh tabs—articles I opened early this morning over breakfast and haven’t yet read—squeezed deceptively snugly between my well-worn e-mail and Google Drive workspace tabs.
“‘Carol of the bells,’ a Christmas staple from Ukraine, a century later,” seems particularly promising, just three days before Christmas itself. Already calculated to stir nostalgia—as everything Christmas inevitably does—its second paragraph sprinkles a little more, with its mention of the beloved Boston Pops orchestra, which I heard on a much warmer (albeit equally crowded) evening some several Fourths of July ago.
“A malleable song that conjures joyful exuberance or aching melancholy depending on the context, this year ‘Carol of the Bells’ conveys both. The 100th anniversary of its debut American performance was Oct. 5, and it is being celebrated as one of Ukraine’s shining contributions to world culture at a time when the country is enduring a devastating war with Russia that is about to stretch into its 11th month,” LeDonne writes (and I read).
Joyful exuberance (and/)or aching melancholy—it puts me in mind of Christmas in Canada: joy in enormous measure, coupled with the inescapable aches of cold—sore, then numb, then tingling fingers and toes, every breath sharp and bitter in one’s nostrils and lungs, eyes squinted against both the snow-sharpened brightness and chill in the air. How manyfold must these minor melancholies be multiplied in Ukraine? Cold becomes catastrophic when power is scarce. I can’t imagine how unrelenting, months-long, endemic fear must compare to the tame and momentary pangs of it I feel in brief moments of threat—a car passing too near my bicycle, an impending oral examination, a strange noise in the night…
Mykola Leontovych, the Ukrainian composer who first arranged “Carol of the Bells,” I learn, was a victim of a Russian effort to “wipe away Ukrainian culture” 101 years ago, killed by an undercover agent—that “history is repeating itself today in the worst manner,” in the words of the creative director of the Ukrainian Institute in Kyiv, Tetyana Filevska. She’s fittingly given the final word in the article, which closes clear and solemn, bright and melancholic as the carol that inspired it:
“Filevska, sounding weary yet hopeful, noted, ‘Of course the song sounds so different in this situation. It’s much more than just another Christmas song,’ she added. ‘It’s a symbol of what’s been happening to our country and our people for the last century.’”
LeDonne, R. (2022, December 20). “Carol of the bells,” a Christmas staple from Ukraine, a century later. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/20/arts/music/carol-of-the-bells-shchedryk-ukraine.html
Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth (‘16) is a science communication researcher and practitioner working on her Ph.D. at Texas Tech University. Natasha hails from Calgary, Alberta. Some of her favo(u)rite authors are C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Bill Bryson. Her favourite earthly place is the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and her favourite activities are reading and enjoying the great outdoors—preferably simultaneously.
