‘Twas a Wine Country Christmas

Regional variations on Christmas classics fascinate me. In parts of England, for example, the eleventh of the “Twelve Days of Christmas” sees “Eleven dames-a-dancing” rather than piper’s piping, which sounds a lot more interesting (unless I’m missing something). Albeit, the term “dame,” for me, evokes the kaleidoscopic burlesque of the Barbary Coast and buxom gun molls named “Sal,” not to mention 11 being prime and all and … Okay, pipers it is.

Like the board game Monopoly, Christmas songs lend themselves very well to geographic-specific parody (our Historic Sonoma Plaza, of course, is a natural for a Monopoly redux, apart from the vacancies and influx of national chain stores). To wit, I present the Christmas-themed riff below. My reinterpretation of Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” more commonly known as “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

It’s a sort of yuletide shout-out to local wineries (or at least those with two syllables in their names) that I annually manage to publish, somewhere, somehow. It’s the gift that keeps giving, you know, like a cold sore. Happy Holidays!

‘Twas a wine country Christmas and all through the cellar
Were stowed bottles of vino and this lucky feller;
Since I was guest, I should’ve inquired
“Say, mind if I binge?” before it transpired.

But my host had remarked “don’t judge a wine by its label”
And so I proceeded to drink him under the table
Then I sneaked down the hall and through the cellar door
Brandishing a corkscrew and thirsting for more

“Now, Ledson! now, Landmark! now, Kamen and Castle!
On, Gundlach! on, Bundschu! on Loxton and Hanzell!
We’ll pop all the corks and we’ll fill every cup
We’ll drink upside down just to say “Bottom’s up!”

Champagne gushed like geysers, merlot poured like rain
Zins went to my head and the cabs to my brain
When every bottle’s a vacation and every sip a holiday
Why not wash down pinot with a fine chardonnay?

My teeth had turned purple, my cheeks had gone red
Visions of cirrhosis danced through my head
Now the cellar was spinning and my view was a blur
An eloquent drunk, I made poetry of slurs

I crawled on my knees, for I’d forgotten my swagger
I’d decline a straight line but would be happy to stagger
And as I bumped in the night toward the end of my carol
I awakened my dear host who had me over a barrel

He was righteously angry, aggrieved and appalled
Not at having drunk his wine, but having drunken it all
But he bowed his head and said with Yule tide resign
“Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good wine.”

Tagged as: christmas, sonoma, twas