Trolling for Christmas
by Julia Sneden
The word troll is an interesting word. It comes from the Middle English trollen, and it has many meanings, among them:
— singing loud and lustily, or celebrating in song, as in “…troll the ancient Yuletide carol…”
— sitting quietly with a hook on a line, waiting for a fish to strike
— an unappealing creature from Scandinavian folklore, given to lurking under bridges and in caves, with nasty intentions to humankind
I can find good use for all three meanings at this time of year:
A dear friend who suffers miserably every Christmas season talks about how depression stalks him, waiting to jump out, grab him, and pull him under. His seasonal misery can’t be dispatched. The cheerier the rest of the world becomes, the blacker his mood: a true troll-and-bridge situation.
Singing loud and lustily, or course, goes without saying during the holidays. I remember the years when my family and the neighbor’s daughters went caroling each Christmas Eve, walking our California hilltop in the black December dark, flashlights playing along the rough edges of the road. In those days, no one thought to offer us money or refreshments, and we would have been insulted if they had. We must have been a raggedy crew, at least vocally. My poor brother’s was the only male voice; we three little girls piped away, trying to carry the melody like true sopranos, but we were inevitably pulled off key by my mother’s strong, trained contralto.
If we didn’t sing beautifully, we sang completely, every word of every verse. I don’t remember setting out to learn all those words, but somehow we just did, because we never had to carry a song sheet. To this day, I can render up every part of Good King Wenceslas or all six verses of The First Noel.
One year it rained with a vengeance, but we put on our slickers and put up our umbrellas, and did our rounds anyway. At each house, we started with “Deck The Halls” because the last verse seemed to fit:
“…sing we joyous, altogether, falalalalalalalala,
heedless of the wind or weather, falalalalalalala”
The last house we came to was newly built and we didn’t know the owners. We had a huddled conference about whether or not we should sing to them, as we had heard that they were elderly and in ill health, and we didn’t want to alarm or disturb them.
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