I am writing this Christmas message to you with a grateful and full heart. We finished a Christmas album! What a hot mess of a year—what an understatement. In light of everything we have all experienced collectively this year, we wanted to offer something special to you this holiday season.

Flat Stan and the Christmas band is a friendship between myself, Alex Nystrom, and Mary Clements. We met in Boone, North Carolina just before Mary’s birthday in 2014. She heard me singing and said “Oh! You have a nice voice! We should start a band!” Admittedly, I had never wanted anything more in my entire life. On her birthday, June 1st, we met up on King Street’s famous Hippy Hill and I told her that I really only knew Christmas songs and so we spent a warm and sunny afternoon changing the words of Santa Baby to reflect our reactionary feminism, “Don’t Call me Baby and Hurry Up the Chimney tonight.” When Mary talked about our meeting to me recently, she said that we recognized each other’s darkness immediately. And in being and singing together, this darkness flickers into an undeniable light.

The process of making this album, and frankly living through the past few years, is no different. Before we sat down at the kitchen table and recorded these tracks, I was about to have a meltdown…ok, I was having a meltdown. I felt anger and frustration during the day, I felt my darkness. Mary sat folding origami stars and I seethed: “If you are aware of the way wealth inequality affects and permeates every aspect of this country and this world, you can’t unsee it!” And as Mary Poppins says to the children before singing Feed the Birds, “Sometimes a person we love…can't see past the end of his nose.” This struggle between the elite and working people, between the rich and poor, between the stuffy and the imaginative is not zeitgeist—it’s an old friend.

The night we recorded these songs at Mary's house in Carrboro, North Carolina, we were supposed to build a fire in her backyard but it started to rain. I nervously considered how this must be a spiritual shift for our little evening and I thought of Fred Hampton, who was assassinated by the U.S. Government on that day, December 4th, in 1969. In his life, he said something about how they expect us to fight fire with fire, but what if we fought with water? Fought racism with solidarity? Fought capitalism by practicing socialism? My man.

The rain came as a blessing, the rain kept us inside. The rain put us in front of our work and so after almost 7 years of friendship and playing music together, we made an album of traditional Christmas songs.

Like Jesus himself, it would be odd to refer to our Christmas art as Christian. That term came after to describe people who followed the teachings of a brown, Middle Eastern man who was killed in front of his people by the government. A person who wanted to feed the hungry, forgive the mistaken, heal the sick, honor women, and liberate the oppressed.

This year so far, we have lost over 322,000 people in the United States to the Coronavirus and 1.7 million worldwide. The virus has disproportionally impacted communities of color, the working-class, and impoverished people. And it has required a great deal from our nurses and other healthcare workers, teachers, grocery store clerks, and all other workers who are now called what they have always been—an essential part of our system.

We also experienced a beautiful and massive uprising in protest of the Black Lives we have lost to senseless police violence due to the on-going structural racism that is ever-present in the United States. We must never forget that this nation was built by enslaved Black people on stolen land at the cost of Indigenous life and dignity. I am currently reading Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States and she references the late Native historian Jack Forbes in saying that though we are not responsible for the actions of our ancestors, we are responsible for the society we now live in which is a product of that past. When we assume this responsibility, it “provides a means of survival and liberation.” (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014; p. 235-236)

This album is a Christmas gift from Mary and me to you and yours. But if you choose to purchase it, all proceeds will be split between two organizations:

Honor the Earth is a Native-led body of fierce Water Protectors who honor and spread awareness of Indigenous wisdom and life through music, art, and activism. They are dedicated to grassroots environmental action and they are currently fighting a proposed pipeline expansion. Follow their efforts:

www.stopline3.org
www.honorearth.org


The Christmas story is fundamentally about the journey of a mother and in honor of our Great Mother and all mothers, the other half of the proceeds will go to the Black Mamas Matter Alliance. BMMA is a Black women-led organization out of Atlanta that centers Black mamas and advocates for their maternal health, rights, and justice. Find them at:

blackmamasmatter.org

We are so deeply grateful to be able to offer you these songs. We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

With Love,
Alex and Mary