A song in my heart, hands on the wheel

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/12/2015 (3923 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Hark, I hear a joyful noise coming from the general direction of my garage.

It’s the heart-tugging sound of me singing popular holiday tunes while sitting in my car.

Like most sane people, I love Christmas carols at this festive time of year, but the only place I feel comfortable giving vocal expression to the deep feelings these seasonal chestnuts stir inside of me is while I am sitting behind the wheel of my (bad word) car.

There is a simple explanation for why I confine my holiday singing to the car — not only am I completely and utterly tonedeaf, but my singing voice has been likened to the noise a wounded bull moose would make if it was trapped inside a trash compactor.

I became aware of my inability to sing when I was about eight years old and my parents encouraged me to become a member of the children’s choir at church. I vaguely recall standing around with other sweaty kids in starched white shirts shrieking notes with kid-like gusto.

Eventually, however, the choir director, Mrs. Ugly Old Bat, realized there was a problem in the sense that someone — let’s see if you can guess who I’m talking about — had no idea what notes he was supposed to be hitting or what the words to any of the songs were.

She determined this by ordering all the kids to stand in a line and sing a few notes while she hunched over and lurched along the line with one ear inches away from our faces. When she got to me, her face scrunched up like a fist, then she pulled me out of the line and, with great sensitivity, explained, when it came to singing, I had a great future in front of me as a landscaper gardener.

Fortunately, this incident did not cause any long-lasting emotional scars and I almost never burst into tears for no apparent reason, but that is not the point.

The point is I really, really like singing holiday tunes when I am alone in the car, especially while I am driving. What I will do is tune the radio to one of those stations that plays nothing but Christmas songs all day long, then I will wait for a tune I like and attempt to vocally catch a note and hang on for dear life, all the while holding the steering wheel in a vise-like grip and craning my neck towards the sunroof in a sincere effort to capture the festive emotion being expressed by whatever artist is performing on my radio.

I will sing along to almost anything, with the exception of that song Wonderful Christmastime, wherein Paul McCartney sings the line “Simply having a wonderful Christmas time” over and over and over until you want to stuff candy canes into your ears to make it stop.

The only problem I encounter during these in-car vocal sessions is, being a typical Canadian, my overcrowded brain is unable to recall the correct lyrics to any song, including Happy Birthday and our national anthem.

If you have ever been in a sports stadium when the time comes to sing O Canada, you know this is true. Instead of the correct lyrics, what you will typically hear is thousands of patriotic Canadians, none of whom could sing in unison if their lives depended on it, glancing furtively around and humming the lyrics to Happy Birthday under their breath.

Fortunately, I have discovered an excellent trick for those embarrassing moments when my brain can’t recall the words to whatever song the radio and I are trying to sing.

When I get to a bit I can’t remember, I will simply insert the impossible-to-forget words from one of two timeless holiday tunes, by which I mean “Fa la la la la” and “Rum-pum-pum-pum.” Everyone has those lyrics seared into their brains, even if they cannot remember precisely what carols they are originally from.

Take The Twelve Days of Christmas, for instance. Most of us are fine up until the point where “my true love gave to me FIVE GOLDEN RINGS!” but after that our brains typically descend into complete holiday chaos.

So I no longer work myself into a lather over how many swans were a swimming or how many lords were a-leaping, and just belt out something like: “On the 10th day of Christmas… rum-pum-pum-pum, rum-pum-pum-pum!”

It’s even more festive when you insert fa la la la la, because you can stretch that line out as long as you (bad word) want — “Fa la la la laaaaaaaaaaaa… ” — until you turn purple and begin to black out.

Anyway, I think you get the thrust of today’s holiday gist, so the time has come for us to throw caution to the wind, turn up the volume on our car radios, and join our voices together as we belt out this patriotic holiday classic:

“O Canada / Something something something / True patriot love / Rum-pum-pum-pum / With glowing hearts / Fa la la la la la la la laaaaaaa!”

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca