You'd think I'd be more concerned about last night's dream, the one at the Yankees game where Tucker Carlson and I are sitting in godawful nosebleed seats so poorly placed you can't even see the field, and Carlson is having a midlife crisis, he shows me the play he's been working on, which is sort of an Aristophanes-meets-James Baldwin one-act only badly written and with no stage direction. For some reason I have to lie about it, obsequiously, telling Tucker that I like it, it's good, really, and the little moppish news-wart is buying it, ready to chuck the tube for the stage, only some big Bronx galoot in the row back is reading over my shoulder and tells Tucker bluntly where he can stick his bow tie.

Cuban tobacco baron sharing holiday cheer

But there are two things I really can't get off my mind. Firstly the dinner at Café Havana, second another year of Christmas stuffing. They're fused together upstairs like so many marshmallow peeps, and I'd rather begin with yesterday, and the Cuban meal. I'd never been to Café Havana, but now I can see it's beige and brass and guayabera clad waiters straight out of a movie, the way the glam scene sparkled, swank-walkers on the make while scents of cashmere wafted overhead and like a whim everyone around the birthday table ordered the lone vegetarian meal, a plate laden with jasmine rice and churo, black beans, corn meal, a potent portabello, and the most deliciously fried width-wise plantain slices with orange sauce for dipping. With every forkful I was taken back in time to an age when people could jaunt just south of Florida and treat themselves to a colonialist feast, Cuba, a sort of Banana Republican Las Vegas. That was then, and this, now, Cuba has apparently become a tourist attraction of a different kind, a rebellious symbol of social causes and subtly illicit vacations. For Americans, Cuba is a cold war time capsule, and we're getting hooked on no greater nostalgic symbol than genuine 50's Chevrolets. I could swear to you this instant, blink twice and there's no difference between dinner at Café Havana and old Havana circa 1952 as depicted in The Godfather Part Two circa 1974.

The other thing now is that can you believe I read one of Nick Hornby's popular pop-cultural books? I forget which, exactly, but it was the one where the uninspiring protagonist is living off royalty checks from a Christmas carol his father or uncle or somebody had written. What fantastic fantasy! No doubt legions of songwriters around the Christian globe dream of like success, the lifetime of airplay that awaits when they craft the perfect holiday diddy. I heard that if you took every Christmas album

Cuban tobacco hanger hanging stockings

released since 1950 and piled them end to end they'd reach up to the moon. No joke. I heard it even works if you're talking about mini-disks, and I can think of no more fitting tribute to the determination of the music business and the lucrativity of December airplay than Chrismas albums through the sky.

The disheartening news is that it seems exceedingly difficult to crack one's way into the holiday carol market. In fact, the newest entry to the ASCAP Top-10 Holiday Song List is none other than Jose Feliciano; Who can forget Feliz Navidad? Well, actually, I don't even remember it. It was before my time, way back in 1970, and nothing has even sniffed the big money airplay since. Which leads me to think that its a good thing Feliciano wasn't from Cuba, because he'd have never gotten onto the commercial charts with that kind of political stigma. Nowadays, Cuba's marketability is an outgrowth of its revolutionary past, residue of supposedly quaint notions like class or socialism or popular revolt. Buena Vista Social Club is a great example, or the Motorcycle Diaries, or El Duque. In fact, Bush seems to owe both of his sketchy electoral victories to the revolutionary fixations of Miami expatriates, and in fact there seems to be a way in which the inability of a select group of Cubans to move past the 1950's is one of the reason our country is backsliding right now. Nostalgia can be dangerous.

There are at least three radio stations in this market alone that switch to 24 hours of holiday programming on the day after Thanksgiving, and to listen to an hour's set is to step back in time. Apparently, the heyday of Christmas songwriting was the golden age of radio, right around the time It's a Wonderful Life (1946) came out. So many of the Top ASCAP Holiday Songs are from that pre-Castro Cuban heyday, and I wonder why it is that Christmas nurtures

Cuban cigar stacker decorating Fir tree

nostalgia like a Vegas video slot. Why is it that all of a sudden Bing Crosby is contemporary? Personally, its hard not to blame grandparents. I'd hazard that playlists are the result of sinister connections between memory and cookie baking, that those innocent-seeming sweets are laced not just with gingerbread but topped with a love of vaudeville, garnished with black and white film, decorated with Jack Lemmon and Bob Hope.

If that were true, I should think that the median point of Christmas airplay would gradually move forward in time, reflecting the earliest memories of those with the peak purchasing power, and might even now be approaching the 60's or 70's. I should think I'd see newer songs starting to pop through the dense Christmas fog, like Grandma Got Runover By a Reindeer, but far as I can tell that doesn't seem to be happening. Christmas tunage is nobly fixed, and 19th century hymns stand like Parthena over today's modern media circus.

If pressed, I'd guess that the golden age of Christmas music has to do with the potential of monolithic media to shape the culture. Today's media consolidation is of a wholly different stripe than the days of yore. Though Clear Channel owns nearly all of the radio stations in my local listening area, those stations have a superficial diversity that makes Christmas branding nearly impossible. Country, Conteporary, Alternative, Adult-listening, you know the generic drill. I'm afraid that this kind of fracturing makes caroling impossible. Back in the

Cuban cigar roller making presents

50's era, the networks were king makers that could effortlessly imprint their listening audience with cultural homogeneity, so much so that a man like Johnny Marks (1909-1985) could write not one… not two… but three of the ASCAP Top 25 Holiday Songs (Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree, and Jingle Bell Rock).

The closest thing we have to that kind of audience platform is the Super Bowl halftime show, and even that's has become a medly of generic confusion and Jacksonian surrealism, akin to an Eminem and Elton John duet. Sadly, a songster has as much chance of getting a new carol inducted into the canon as I have of becoming an alternate for the Bulgarian gymnastics squad, unless that person is named Bono, in which case thir odds are more like the odds of Paul Hamm applying for Bulgarian citizenship. Still… those three fedora'd old men playing Cuban music in their blazers were charming as all get out.