Artist: Micah P. Hinson
Hometown: Abilene, Texas
Song: “Please Daddy, Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas”
Album: I Lie to You
Release Date: December 2, 2022
Label: Ponderosa Records
In Their Words: “‘The warmth of my childhood Christmas’ lives inside this song, and inside that whole John Denver Christmas album, with the blue painting of snow-topped mountains; my mother and father putting it on the record player every year. My memory serves perfectly the flashing lights and singing and stories and being humans and family out in West Texas, where the hills were barely hills and the mesquite trees protect no one and nothing. At least when I was a much younger boy, the snow would come sideways on the sharp winter winds that cut through my hometown.
“John Denver played on the phonograph as we’d take out the ornaments, glass and carved wood and the reds and greens, finding places for them on the branches, looking out the window to flashing lights on the houses across the alley. It was Magic. Looking back, those days when we still had seasons and by the grace of the gods, there wasn’t much to worry about. There were blankets on the bed and it was all a strange innocence in the midst of a wild world. The shields and walls that surrounded me there in my youth were all serving as well-placed and well-timed distractions from my true realization of those who did not have what I had, and where those winter days were not Magic, but fierce and wicked.
“And, listening to the words of this song, as if I couldn’t hear properly as a boy, where the song has brought jokes and laughs, it brings with it that side of reality, where Christmas lights have not warmth, but concern, and where presents were but a thing of movies and fiction.” — Micah P. Hinson
Photo Credit: Natalia Andreoli
