Information:
- From an interview with Sharon from the Belfast Telegraph:
The as yet unfinished new album [The Same Sun] includes a track called Christmas Night, which is essentially about missing her mother Jean who died on November 24, 1999, in the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where she was being treated for cryptogenic fibrosing alveolitis, a chronic lung disease.
"You're going to get me crying again!" she shrieks. When I interviewed her in 2010 she cried her eyes out, mostly talking about Jean.
"My thing about Christmas is that the past is in your present at Christmas permanently," she explains. "Christmas is really difficult, I find. My memories are of mum stuffing the turkey and kind of being a bit... very tired under the eyes, and knowing that she was working too hard and stuff. Christmas is your past so much. The memories are absolutely huge.
"And now at this stage of my life," she continues, "having experienced the loss of mum, I can see it in everybody else around me too. I can see them missing the people that they love at Christmas. So it almost becomes more about that. Some of the magic of innocence is lost and it is regained in my children. But it is lost in myself. And sometimes I find it hard to get away from the memories.
"The song is about 'I miss you', basically. Christmas Night is about 'No matter what I'm doing or no matter how I'm braving it through or no matter how I'm walking through Christmas or I'm experiencing the whole idea of Christmas and the jingle bells, the whole thing that is going on within is that you're not here.' And that's it. That's what the song is about."
[...]
How do you look back on the time of your mum's death? Does it feel like another world, almost?
"Yeah," Sharon says, wistful again. "It actually feels like a completely different era. It really does. It feels very far away.
"You look at your phone and she is never going to ring you. You understand what forever means, I say.
"Never ever again. It still catches me, but it does seem much more distant now. Except at Christmas..."v Sharon says but, for once, doesn't smile.
Written By:
- Christmas Night was written by Sharon and Don Mescal for her solo album The Same Sun.
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