By the time Christmas Eve arrives, most holiday music has already asked us to feel about six different kinds of wonderful. The tree is glowing, the whole family made it home, and apparently nobody had a difficult year. Chris Chitsey and Bee Smith’s “Be Mary” starts after those songs have worn out their welcome. There’s a tree, all right. The person beside it feels awful.
I’m drawn to that opening because it doesn’t make a spectacle of sadness. We’re not given a tragic backstory or told precisely whom to blame. Sometimes a holiday goes badly without turning into a television movie. You’re tired, or you miss somebody, or an ordinary problem feels enormous because every window on the street is lit up as if life were going perfectly indoors. The lyric leaves enough unsaid for a listener to bring their own December to it.
The title sounds like an instruction, which made me wary at first. The quickest way to lose a lonely person is to tell them whom they ought to resemble. But the Mary in this song isn’t a porcelain figure who sailed through the Nativity with a serene smile. She faced childbirth without a proper room. The comparison works when it lets her be tired and unsure, just as the person beside the tree is allowed to be.
Chitsey and Smith have been here together before, though in sunnier territory. Their earlier duet, “Summer Before The Fall,” dealt with friends edging toward romance. Chitsey comes out of Texas country, while Smith grew up in Lancashire with a love of ’90s country storytelling. That history gives “Be Mary” an interesting shift in subject. Instead of asking whether two people will get together, it asks whether one person can bear to let anyone near.
Country music has long kept a place for the blue Christmas. Elvis could make loneliness sound almost stylish in “Blue Christmas.” “Be Mary” is less interested in longing for a particular person than in the awkward business of accepting comfort at all. Its best thought is that you can carry joy without actually feeling joyful tonight. Anybody who has smiled through a holiday dinner knows the difference.
I’m less convinced when the lyric starts piling on words like cheerful and glad. That feels like somebody turning up the Christmas lights because you said you had a headache. The story has already done the kinder work: it noticed the person in the room, then offered them Mary’s company. It doesn’t need to rush them toward a brighter mood.
Still, I can imagine sending “Be Mary” to someone who has told me they’re dreading Christmas. I wouldn’t attach an explanation. The song may remind them that the first Christmas wasn’t especially comfortable for the people at its center. Maybe they’ll hear an invitation to answer a friend’s call. Maybe they’ll just feel less strange for having a hard night. Either would be enough.
Chadwick Easton