cruel optimism new year - by rayne fisher-quann

A few years ago, in a pub in Ireland during the wettest days of spring, I stood on my tip-toes at the edge of the bar stage and asked the band if they could please play Fairytale of New York by the Pogues. The singer scrunched up his face at me, laughed a bit, and said something like, isn’t that a Christmas song? And I wanted to say something like — actually it’s a song about disappointment, cruelty of circumstance, suicidal optimism, constant benign devastation; it’s about the disaster of everything, the absurdity, the fact that it’s been getting darker since July, and it’s about knowing, still, that all there is to do is throw up your hands and find a kind of witless hoping amidst the meaninglessness. This idea is pretty much exactly what The Holiday Season in general is all about, which few Christmas songs understand at all and almost none convey quite as well, and so I guess it is a Christmas song (it might actually be the only Christmas song), but it gets there almost by coinciden

A few years ago, in a pub in Ireland during the wettest days of spring, I stood on my tip-toes at the edge of the bar stage and asked the band if they could please play Fairytale of New York by the Pogues. The singer scrunched up his face at me, laughed a bit, and said something like, isn’t that a Christmas song? And I wanted to say something like — actually it’s a song about disappointment, cruelty of circumstance, suicidal optimism, constant benign devastation; it’s about the disaster of everything, the absurdity, the fact that it’s been getting darker since July, and it’s about knowing, sti