How Perry Como left a Christmas song in my heart

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

It always begins with Perry Como. That’s what I tell my granddaughter, Charlotte. Until I hear a Perry Como Christmas song, I have no holiday spirit. But once “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” or (“There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” plays on the radio? I’m all jingle bells and holly.

And Charlotte says, “Who’s Perry Como?” And I say “Can you imagine, 60 years from now, someone asking you, “Who is Taylor Swift?”

But of course, she can’t imagine. She is only 16.

So I tell her briefly who Perry Como was. Later that day, I find myself thinking not about who Perry Como was to the world, but who he was to me.

He was the first man I ever loved besides my father. That’s what I wrote 40 years ago for The Patriot Ledger when I met him at South Shore Music Circus in Cohasset. But he was more than just a child’s crush. He was an icon, a star, a barber turned crooner. A family man. A man whose career would span 60 years.

He called my mother once when she was in a nursing home and too ill to come to his show. He called from Symphony Hall. “Dot Curtin. You have a call from Perry Como!” blared over the intercom. He made her feel like a prizewinner on the TV game show “Queen for a Day.”

He also was the man who taught me the real meaning of Christmas. I heard the story from Sister Patricia Ann when I was in first grade. And from my parents, too. Plus, I had a Little Golden Book, “The Christmas Story.” I knew the tale. But I’d never really heard it, never felt the love and the drama and the holiness of it, until that night when I was 7 or 8 and Perry Como read “The Story of the First Christmas” on TV and other people with voices like angels sang it. And then Perry Como sang it, too.

I see this night as clearly as if were happening now. I am sitting on the parlor floor in front of our green couch, with its white doilies, my mother and father on the couch behind me. I am fresh from a bath, my hair wet but combed, a flannel bathrobe keeping me warm, socks — not slippers —on my feet. The TV is on, “The Perry Como Show” about to start. The screen is no bigger than the comic books I bought with my dimes. The comic books are in color; the people on the screen are in black and white. I know that the people on the screen can see me because I can see them so I sit up straight and pay attention. My father gets up from the couch and adjusts the antenna and the picture snaps into focus. He turns up the volume and I hear my mother and Perry Como begin to sing “Dream Along With Me (I’m on My Way to a Star).”

And I am happy.

Perry Como begins all his shows with this song. I watch him every Saturday night from 8 to 9. I am allowed to stay up late. But this show, this Christmas show, isn’t like his other shows where he smiles and fools around and sings random songs people request. “Letters, we get letters, we get stacks and stacks of letters.” In parts, it is very solemn, a word I don’t know yet. But it’s a word whose meaning I feel.

Perry Como’s son reads some of the Christmas story with him. I didn’t know he had a son and a daughter — she’s on TV, too — in the group of children listening to the story and songs. I wave at them. But they don’t wave back. I hear songs I don’t know, hymns we don’t sing at St. Bernadette’s in Randolph. And then it’s almost 9 and Perry Como is singing “The Lord’s Prayer” instead of “You are Never Far Away from Me,” the song he always ends with. And then the show is over.

But it stays with me. Even though I never see it again. Even though it was long before reruns and recordings and on demand.

And since? Every time I hear Perry Como sing a Christmas song, I am a child again, in the parlor with my parents, watching a black-and-white TV, my robe wrapped tight, waving at people I am positively certain see me in black and white, too.

Reels from the past are jolted into spinning most often by the sound of a voice, by the notes of a song, by a scent, by a physical object. But this year it was a simple question by a 16-year-old that propelled the projector.

“Who is Perry Como?” Charlotte asked.

And I remembered.