It was Christmas in Prison
And the food was real good
We had turkey and pistols
Carved out of wood
In my estimation, this song off 1973’s “Sweet Revenge” album is the tune that best summarizes what made 2020 specifically shitty. Like many Prine classics, it is a seemingly straightforward, blue-collar story that rewards greater scrutiny. The song is not about Christmas nor prison.
And I dream of her always
Even when I don’t dream
Her name’s on my tongue
And her blood’s in my stream
Prine routinely employed traditional, accessible symbols and imagery throughout his storytelling: the hollowness of sticker-clad patriotism, Jesus as a teenager in a flat on the lower east side of Rome, the specific, inevitable loneliness of the elderly not acknowledged and the youthful optimism of Thursday nights at the roller rink buoyed by egg farmers’ daughters wheeling circles as their dads peddled poultry in town. A man who looked deeply at the ordinary. Grand existentialism of the small.
She reminds me of a chess game
With someone I admire
Or a picnic in the rain
After a prairie fire
Prine himself once said of “Christmas in Prison,” “It’s about a person being somewhere like a prison, in a situation they don’t want to be in. And wishing they were somewhere else.” Prison is the perfect vehicle for this imagery, and the humanity of the incarcerated is classic Prine. The limitations and restrictive lifestyle of the incarcerated are the direct result of errors made along the way. Be they institutional failings to create opportunities for success, bad decision making, shortcuts to improving one’s station, the new Jim Crow or the myriad other reasons someone might end up behind bars.
Her heart is as big
As this whole goddamn jail
And she’s sweeter than saccharine
At a drug store sale
Prine had a deep affinity for the Christmas holiday, even reportedly keeping a tree up year-round in his bachelor home (according to Rolling Stone magazine). Christmas represents community, love, family and safety among other warm yuletide feelings. And Prine ratchets these feelings further by centering the elegy on a woman around whom our protagonist orbits. Lavishing praise ranging from her being “sweeter than saccharine” to the way she pushes him to be better like “a chess game with someone I admire.” She is both endearingly complicated and eternally generous, an angel in the eyes of our imprisoned narrator.
The search light in the big yard
Swings round with the gun
And spotlights the snowflakes
Like the dust in the sun
These competing states of being are a perfect allegory for the last year plus. We have all been imprisoned in our own ways, whether a house arrest sentence issued by the COVID pandemic or the many other ways our lives have been interrupted. Much of the last year has been defined by absence. The void created by the inaccessibility of all those beautiful people that give our lives so much verve and vivacity. Longing for a type of joy that quite sensibly and for the betterment of all remains heartbreakingly beyond out of reach. There could have been so much more than there ever will be.
It’s Christmas in prison
There’ll be music tonight
I’ll probably get homesick
I love you, Goodnight
We are also oddly lucky to feel this kind of loss. Loss evidences something that was fantastic. An exuberant wonderfulness perhaps most visible in contrast to the greyness of their vacancy. The people that represent all that we hope to be true about humanity. The activities that expose us to the overwhelmingness of beauty. The ephemeral meaning we create for ourselves. COVID has been tragic at worst and a tedious slog at best. An effective, unwanted reminder of all the exaltant joys in our lives.
Wait awhile eternity
Old mother nature’s got nothing on me
Come to me
Run to me
Come to me, now
We’re rolling
My sweetheart
We’re flowing
By God
Essays by Cameron 