I shall return for you, my love

Musings on a Christmas song heard in a store

This is a post I half started before Christmas, which would have made more sense then, but I don’t think it’s limited to that particular day, so I decided to finish it. 

I found myself in TK-Maxx in Nowra a few weeks before Christmas, and to my surprise Dido’s Christmas Day came on over the shop sound system. It’s not a Christmas song you hear often in shops. I doubt the psychology of it would encourage spending, unless it evoked a melancholy calling for retail therapy. 

Nobody knows me in Nowra so I unashamedly sang quietly along in the dressing room and as I returned an item to the clothing racks, because it is a great song, and I was unexpectedly pleased to hear and recall it. It might be just another sappy Christmas love song if it wasn’t for the ambiguous ending. A young gentleman comes riding by, pauses a while by the fire, falls for his host's beauty, then leaves with the words “I shall return for you, my love, on Christmas Day”. The girl waits and prepares and saves all her Sunday clothes for that day. But then the song ends with the line “The last words I heard him say, were the last words I ever heard him say, I shall return for you my love on Christmas Day”. (Listen.)

There’s no explanation given for the ambiguous ending. Was he just a faithless sod who dashed the hopes of his waiting love, after recklessly making promises, or did he go off to war and not survive, or fall ill, or was he waylaid by unforeseen circumstances …? Whatever you imagine may have happened, it satisfying appeals to my melancholy and realistic streak. 

The song got stuck in my head after that visit to Nowra TK-Maxx in the lead up to Christmas so I fell to musing. And it’s the opposite of the true and actual meaning of Christmas really isn’t it. A promise is made, and either by rejection or faithlessness or tragedy or any one of a number of other consequences of the fall, the promise isn’t kept. A waiting girl is heart-broken and disappointed. 

Or perhaps rather it’s that the Christmas story is the opposite of that tale. 

I’ve had my share of encounters with faithless and dishonourable men, men who proved they’d sacrifice me in an instant to protect themselves from even an imaginary threat, who I seemingly empowered to treat me like so much rubbish through my excess of giving. And it can be hard to convince yourself that receiving such behaviour reflects nothing of the love of Christ, and to truly comprehend that Christ's is the love to heal all wounds, that it is faithful, true and reliable, greater than all earthly loves. But it is so. One of my favourite refrains in the bible in “the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever”. 

We might be still waiting for Christ to return for us ultimately, and carry us away to happily ever after, but the incarnation and resurrection are the proof and the first fruits of what’s to come. Christ says “I shall return for you, my love” (more or less - John 14:2-3) and he means it and won’t be thwarted by anything in this life. 

Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay