Key points:
- A Middle Tennessee church holiday pageant inspired the lighthearted Christmas single “First United Methodist Day Care Christmas Show.”
- Three years ago, singer-songwriter Amy Speace attended the Christmas program because her 3-year-old son was performing.
- As the song documents, everything did not go perfectly, but it’s hard to find fault at such an endearing event.
While Amy Speace and her 6-year-old son Huck celebrate Christmas this year, odds are classic Christmas songs like “Silent Night,” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and maybe a novelty like “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” will be in the air.
But there’s a new one that deserves to be heard — about a United Methodist church’s Christmas pageant, where children don’t always do what they rehearsed and Joseph has “snot running everywhere.”
“It’s 100% true,” said a chuckling Speace, the songwriter behind “First United Methodist Day Care Christmas Show.”
“I (at first) thought it was just a novelty song, and it turned out there was something underneath it … a nice moment of levity.”
The lighthearted yet heart-tugging song is on Speace’s new album, “The American Dream,” where it shines between other well-crafted songs about serious topics such as divorce, the fragility of life and what happens after dreams don’t come true.
The events in “First United Methodist Day Care Christmas Show” happened three years ago at First United Methodist Church of Hendersonville, Tennessee, near Nashville. Speace wrote it for the staff at the church’s Children First Preschool, where Huck attended at the time. But she moved away before playing it for them.
From the song: “The star on the riser in glittering gold/Stood behind the scene stealing the show/There were goats and one boy peed his pants/ When Santa came out they all jumped and danced.”
Neilson Hubbard, who produced “The American Dream” album, believes another line in the song is its heart: “It was the best damned show I’d ever seen.”
“The way she says that line … makes me feel it,” he said. “I think that’s really all you needed so that it doesn’t just become spoofy.”
The song recalls the work of the legendary John Prine, Hubbard offered.
“Prine had that special gift of being able to tell a joke, but you see the humanity in it, and you’re like, ‘Wait, this has more weight to it.’”
It’s hard to predict if “First United Methodist Day Care Christmas Show” will join the ranks of perennials like “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” That song dates back 1,100 years, said Ace Collins, author of 12 books on aspects of Christmas, including “Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas.”
“About once a generation you get a song that becomes a part of the Christmas canon,” Collins said.
Of more modern Christmas songs, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” has a chance to be enduring, he said. Some have called Carey the “Queen of Christmas.”
“Mariah Carey comes out of a summer hibernation every year and (promotes) her song,” Collins said. “But when she quits performing, will that song continue to be played? … If you go back 30 years, The Carpenters’ Christmas song (“Merry Christmas, Darling”) was probably played as much as any Christmas song on the radio, and now you rarely hear it. So once Karen Carpenter died, her contribution to Christmas has pretty much faded away as well.”
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Speace isn’t looking to be the next Queen of Christmas. She has released 12 albums of confessional songs in the realm of James Taylor or the more subdued work of Bruce Springsteen.
“She is a phenomenal writer,” Hubbard said. “I think she’s as good as anyone right now in the Americana folk style, whether it’s Kim Richey, Mary Gauthier or Jason Isbell. She’s an incredible writer that’s up there with all of them.”
Born in Baltimore, Speace has also called Minneapolis and Williamsport, Pennsylvania, home as her family moved when her father changed jobs. She graduated from Amherst College, pursued her career in New York for about a decade, then moved to Nashville in 2009.
She studied acting at the National Shakespeare Conservatory, taking up songwriting “just as a fun thing” and started performing in clubs.
“That’s when Judy Collins’ manager saw me and introduced my music to Judy Collins,” Speace said. “She signed me to a record label (Wildflower Records).”
“The American Dream” is Speace’s 11th album. “First United Methodist Day Care Christmas Show” will be released soon to coincide with the holiday season. Speace has video she shot at the Christmas pageant in question, but can’t use it because of the difficulty of attaining permission from the parents.
Speace grew up in the Catholic church and says she “explored Buddhism, like a college student does.” Her dad was a United Methodist.
“My dad had a great church, so I would go to my dad’s church a lot when I was home visiting,” she said. “I started going to a real progressive Episcopal church (St. Augustine’s Episcopal Chapel) in Nashville, and I love it.
“So now Huck was dunked in the river, and so we’re Episcopal now.”
Patterson is a UM News reporter in Nashville, Tennessee. Contact him at 615-742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free Daily or Weekly Digests.
