A Carolina Christmas

Christmas brings Mariah Carey, 75-percent-off sales, and, for my family, a trip to my mom’s Southern suburban hometown of Concord, North Carolina. Down there, Christmas signifies more than the token tree in the living room and Duane Reade window decorations, and every year, my holiday begins with the Christmas Eve service at my grandparents’ church.

The service is casual and lovely and ends with a quaint ceremony in which the congregants, each holding a candle, light their neighbor’s wick as they all sing the familiar, soothing “Silent Night.”

But in the middle of this year’s service, the choir director’s daughter stepped on stage to sing “Emmanuel,” a drudging ballad of a hymn that I had never heard of before, and as soon as she released the first note, it was very clear that the song was going to be unfortunate. She was terrible. Not voice-cracking, not squeaky—there was nothing particularly notable about how bad her voice was, but it was bad in an off-pitch, out-of-key, YouTube-funny way.

The calm I previously felt devolved into a broadening grin, then a suppressed giggle, then burgeoning self-consciousness at my inappropriate response to her humiliation. Rather than feel bad for the poor girl, standing alongside her dad with the beautiful baritone, my sisters and I started laughing. At first our laughter was controlled, almost squelched. But once one of my sisters released an indelicate, indecorous snort, my control waned. I started laughing so hard that I quaked. I held my hair in front of my face and pinched my legs, but no matter how hard I bit down on my lower lip or tried to imagine that it was I being humiliated on stage, I could not stop shaking, sobbing silently with utter exuberance.

It was wildly inappropriate, terribly disrespectful, and downright mean, and I don’t know where it came from. I would like to think that I am not just a sucker for schadenfreude and that instead the hysterics were partially the result of feeling out of place in the devout setting. Or partially because of the irony that “Emanuel” is also the name of my temple back home. Or maybe it was just an expression of pure immaturity. I really don’t know. Regardless, it was a jolly service indeed.