Four Days Until Christmas: “Maybe Christmas” (Pooh)

Masters of high-profile pop, Pooh are often capable of creating poetry too. Poetry accessible to all, but no less valid for this: after all, it is an advantage to be able to speak about ordinary people, about respectable people, translating their emotions into music. And Pooh also achieved this by reflecting on Christmas. Which they did on two occasions, as well as in the successful reinterpretation of Lennon’s “Happy Xmas”.

The band’s first “Christmas” piece is entitled “Maybe Christmas”, and was born in 1985… in Australia. The Poohs were on tour around the world and were experiencing a Christmas whose normal, deeper atmosphere was impossible for them, at that moment, to reconstruct. And from there a song was born, recorded the following year for a “on-theme” compilation, which looked for the signs, the traces, the imprints of Christmas.
Inside an emotional escalation that forgot nothing about the Christmas of ordinary people.
“Maybe Christmas is the traffic, shops that don’t close, hands you shake at the bar… / Maybe Christmas is what they give me, which then never serves… / Maybe Christmas is believing in it, in a comet or in a man… / Maybe Christmas is my home, from many winters ago…”

The crowd of commercial Christmas. The futility of a Christmas of habits. The Christmas of those who believe (and who are usually sung little in songs). Christmas inside. In short, Christmas everything. And in the final verse also a Christmas which, from the inside, must also be brought back to the outside.
“Maybe Christmas is moving for a moment towards those who don’t / But the tomorrow we make with our hands, each of us, is also Christmas / Merry Christmas: from this night onwards…” Simple words that say a lot about Christmas. And they reach everyone’s heart, an objective that only so-called “light” music can achieve. Knowing how to do it, obviously.

But the Poohs were able to overcome “Maybe Christmas” in a piece, “It doesn’t need to be Christmas”, which was also presented at the «Christmas in the Vatican» of 1994. And which, again with everyday words, recalled in a poignant way how much of Christmas we could, or rather should, keep with us even when Christmas isn’t. Without preaching, because the subject is “us”, all of us. But always using the excellent artifice of writing in which the reflections are proposed in crescendo.

“How much dust the world makes as it goes… / It covers everything and no longer lets us see the seasons, the doubts, the children and the hopes… / What a noise the world makes as it goes… / Between noises, wars, money / and jealousies… / We confuse the next day with eternity, and cheerfulness with happiness…
«We confuse the next day with eternity», yes. This too, unfortunately, is sometimes our Christmas. And to linger on it, you might even need a nice pop song. A song that encourages us to “cry for someone who leaves us and won’t come back”, instead of hiding our emotions by chasing models of presumed “winners”. A song that has the courage to tell us to stop, instead of “fixing” life “with love and medicine”.
Let’s stop: even when it’s not Christmas, or at least at Christmas.
Because… «If every now and then we stopped to think… If we lived and let things get by…», then «…It would be every day a little
Christmas”.
And it would be worth it, for us, common people.

This song is taken from the book “Le musiche del Natale” by Andrea Pedrinelli, courtesy of the author and publisher Ancora.