(Thomas Froese)
In this 2021 scene, Elizabeth Froese skates at Lake Jojo, also known as the Dundas Marsh.
November is horribly early to roll out Christmas music, even for the diehards, but it’s about to fall upon us as surely as snowflakes and that hypnotic holiday shopping.
It’s called Christmas creep for a reason.
On the other hand, today, November 7, is the birthday of Joni Mitchell, the Canadian singer-songwriter, who, for my money, has the best Christmas song for any day of the year. The song “River, and its official video – a dreamscape, fluid-ink animation that’s strikingly worthwhile in itself – is as close as your phone.
Granted, if you and the neighbours are playing Family Feud, nobody will think of “River” as a Top 5 Christmas song. “White Christmas?” Sure. “Silent Night?” Of course. Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You?” Cha-ching to never-ending royalties on that one.
But with Mitchell, a Canadian icon who’s won 10 Grammys, turning 83 today, consider this. She wrote “River” in 1970 after experiencing relational heartbreak and the shallowness of life in California, this while pining for her simpler youth in the frozen winters of Saskatchewan. Her river is not entirely a river as much as an image. It’s home. It’s escaping emotional pain.
Now imagine skating away in your own life. You might even dream of it, literally. As a kid I’d dream about ice skating to, of all places, my boyhood school. With great joy, there I go back and forth. What, I need a river for this?
Then there’s a few winters ago when my eldest, Elizabeth, needed photo art for her own modest music. So where did the young lady, Liz, take me with her skates and summer dress? To a frozen Lake Jojo, the Dundas Marsh, the place she imagined as the best.
Which is to say that there are rivers and then there are rivers. There’s the physical place, then there’s that river that’s like a doorway.
And isn’t this how art, at least good art, works? It honours the so-called “thisness” of life. The particular. The concrete. The everyday. Because this is how the majesty of truth, if it comes at all, comes to us.
You sing about a specific place, like a river. Or you sing poetically about an experience, like a broken heart, because, like Joni writes in her song, “I’m so hard to handle, I’m selfish and I’m sad.” People then listen and relate to your grief and regret, before then flying off on some river of their own, even if they’ve never once laced up a pair of skates.
The Christmas narrative moves in the same way. The cosmic mystery of God isn’t some abstract theory or vague hooey. Rather, it became a particular child in time and place, with specificity – poor and displaced and needy – so we’d see and touch and smell him, full diapers and all. So we might relate to that human vulnerability and feel less lonely and more connected.
Good art and good spirituality have this intimate relationship. And thank God they do, because this helps fill the emptiness that’s also part of the upcoming holiday season.
The other thought about music and this time of year is that votes will soon be in for this year’s top local stories. And the 2026 Juno Awards, held at TD Coliseum in March, was surely a highlight of what Hamilton Region offers.
I was there on that early spring day with my daughter, the Lake Jojo skater, the two of us sitting some distance from the stage, as far east as the stage was west. From there we saw Joni receive her Juno Lifetime Achievement Award from Prime Minister Mark Carney.
Far, yet close, there’s Joni, large on-screen, our troubadour on stage with her cane and black velvet beret, reminding us that Canada has both good rivers and good music, that it’s still a fine place to skate away in any season.
Today, it’s an especially good memory to have.
Happy Birthday to Joni.