White Christmas by Otis Redding

    There's something about Otis' voice that lodges deep in the soul and begins a trickle of bittersweet melancholy. Even when he's singing about something not necessarily unhappy or negative, like sitting on the dock of the bay, it makes me pensive and quiet with memories.

    I always imagined his version of White Christmas as being sung by a loner in a bar nursing their 5th whiskey as they reminisce about happier Christmases, maybe when they were part of a family before some catastrophic event like a death or layoff (sorry, that's a little dark, but it's reality), and the line "may all your Christmases be so white" is actually wishing their ex-lover the happy life they couldn't be a part of. 

Lately, I hear it more as Otis dreaming and reminiscing over memories of his childhood, when we all have (or should have) a certain amount of imagination and inexperience to insulate us from the sorrows and regrets of adulthood; the Christmases when children only had to worry about and if their snow pants and mittens were dry from yesterday's sledding/snowball fight for today's snow fort building mission.