Jingle Bells - Kaskade (feat. Soran)
I’ve never heard a more serious version of Jingle Bells. At the end of her rendition, Ella Fitzgerald shouts “I’m just crazy ‘bout horses!” and the vocals cut off sharply enough that I wonder if she started laughing. Bing Crosby sings the verses quite straightforwardly, but then the Andrews Sisters start making strange trilling noises and otherwise seem to be goofing around.
I know it’s not necessarily more adult to be more serious. Or, at very least, there ought to come a time when you loop back around to being entirely unable to take yourself seriously. I love Jenny Joseph’s poem Warning, which starts:
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
She wrote that poem when she was 29. She died last year, hopefully having fulfilled her prophecy. A later verse:
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.
It's not surprising that I'm in that phase of my adult life nowadays. Often a more serious cover version of myself. My age is relevant to this, but age always feels so relative.
I was talking to my father recently about how “old” always seems older than you are. He turned 60 last year. When my Nana was in her 70s, I remember her confessing, laughing, that the local ninety-year-olds seemed “positively ancient!” but that she had trouble seeing herself as old.
I used to be half-offended when my mum would refer to our undergraduate tenants, a decade or so older than me, as “the kids downstairs”. That seems much more appropriate now. At dinner a few months ago, I said to a friend, “I just… I want to respect people’s ideas, but also younger people often seem over-optimistic? Like they’ll have some reason why the reference class that their idea or problem seems to be a part of doesn’t actually apply to their special case, and I disagree.”
She gave me a look. “Well, that is the thing that old people typically say about young people, yes.”
I felt very called out.
Yours in aging gracelessly,
- Tessa