My Christmas

Three weeks before this single came out, Yemi published an essay about Christmas. It is not a devotional. It is an inventory of everything he had tried to make the day mean something, in the order he tried it, and it is unusually unflattering about himself.

It starts with the family rule. Every Christmas, every child in the house got a new piece of clothing — not negotiable, whatever the money situation. Do exceptionally well in your school exams and something extra arrived on top. He describes spending the rest of the year daydreaming about which one it would be: Ralph Lauren, Nike, or the best Ankara money could buy.

Then he outgrew the clothes and worked down the list. Friends. Food — he mentions a Christmas he ate until he was sick. Films, watched back to back until the day was over. Then a girlfriend, on the theory that being in love would supply the meaning. Each one is recounted, and each one ends in the same place.

The sentence in the middle of all this is not about Christmas at all.

I no longer fit into the unit that bore me. My family ties became fragile.On what he was actually missing

That is the same fracture the Father album is built on, written down seven years before Padre was released — which makes this essay, and this song, the earliest public statement of the thing the whole catalogue is about.

It didn’t matter if cash was tight or turkey was reduced to a swimming tail animal — we just have to have a new dress. Period. No debate.On the family tradition

His answer, when he gets there, is not that Christmas needs better observance. It is that the gap he kept trying to fill was never the kind of gap that furniture fits. The essay closes on Isaiah 9:6 — the child born, the son given, the Everlasting Father — which is the same verse Home would close on six years later. Two Christmas records, one verse, and the word Father in both.

One more phrase in it is worth noticing: where the deep calls for the deep. That is Psalm 42:7, and it would become the title of a song seven years afterwards.

The record opens by asking the essay’s question out loud — what does Christmas mean to you? — and then handing it to other people. Fifteen answers follow, unedited and in no particular order: family time, the birth of Jesus, the food, decorations, party, tree, excitement, activities. Giving presents and taking them. The love of God. The sacrifice of Jesus.

Emptiness is a state of the mind, where only divinity can fill.The conclusion of the essay

It is the same list the essay works through, except that in the essay it is his own and he is unsparing about every item on it. Here the answers belong to a room of other people, most of them children, and the song does not correct a single one.

The spoken bridge goes further than that, and it is the most generous thing on the record. It’s okay to look forward to the gifts, the family union and the fun. But Jesus is the reason for the season. He was harder on himself, at length and in public, than he is willing to be with them.

The chorus answers the question in three words — you’re my Christmas — and turns a date into a person, every day and night rather than one morning a year. And the verse does not stop at the manger: born to reign, sacrificed his life, conquering all, he rose again. A Christmas song that runs to Easter before its second chorus.

The recording is a children’s choir record, which is the obvious and correct choice for a song about what a child wanted Christmas to be. Produced by Leke Dada with vocal production by Evans Ogboi, featuring The Gospel Kids. It remains the most-streamed single in the catalogue.