Joy to You and Me

It was a Christmas night like the ones over the years. Close to three dozen of us gathered into our family’s eight hundred square foot house. The little ones played in the cellar and the older kids mingled with the adults who congregated mainly in the dining room, where we sang songs like “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and “Deck the Halls” as Dominick—sister Helen’s husband and family Chet Atkins—played guitar.

My mother, who had taken refuge in her bedroom for a while, emerged and surveyed the scene. “Sing ‘Joy to the World’,” she said

On cue, one of her teenage grandsons let loose with “Jeremiah was a bullfrog!” He was quickly joined by his siblings and cousins who finished the verse and then the chorus, wishing joy to everyone, even the fish in the deep blue sea, and ending with “Joy to you and me.”

Their grandma smiled and shook her head while the rest of us roared. It was moment of family joy.

In Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey speculates about the role joy might’ve played in evolution. Interestingly he writes about joy in context of the spadefoot toads’ croaking, whose vocalizations are not exactly harmonious to the human ear. Abbey wonders whether their croaking is more than about attracting a mate or communicating with neighbors. Perhaps it’s done, he muses, out of “spontaneous love and joy, a contrapuntal choral celebration” celebrating the recent rainfall after an extended dry period. And possibly out of love for their existence and everyday life.

What? A song about the joy of life? Better yet, how about a symphony? Like Beethoven’s Ode to Joy?

Joy is experiencing a revival, strangely because of politics. Now there’s an anomaly: mean-spirited politics making bedfellows with joy. More than pause; it jolts because joy hasn’t just been divorced from politics, it’s been ostracized, expelled, exiled, like Napolean to Elba. We can debate whether joy’s demise is a cause of our social-political miasma or the result of sinister forces seeking to crush it, but I’ll leave that to you to consider.

In “Finding Joy and Engaging in the Dance of Life,” Allison Abrams states that studies show about half of human happiness is genetically predisposed and ten percent circumstantial. That means we control forty percent of our happiness quotient. And that means each of us has plenty of space to amp it up. But, she says, it takes hard work and a strong willingness to make it happen. Nonetheless, evidence shows happiness and, by extension, joy is largely a choice. Which means if you’re not feeling it and there are no painful circumstances preventing it, consider taking a good look into your psychological mirror.

Abbey believes joy is correlated to the survival rate in evolution. He avers the morose and fearful eventually go extinct because courage depends on joy. Without courage, animals—Sapiens included—shrink, tremble, and hide in terror. It’s hard to feel happy and joyful if you’re waiting for a bomb to explode or if you’re a target of hate, yet our friends in the animal kingdom seem to feel it in spite of their fraught environment, like the frogs and toads who croak incessantly despite the presence of predators like snakes, owls, and whatnot.

When I read Abbey’s musings, I wondered whether there was a link between them and Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World,” since Abbey published Desert Solitaire in 1968 and TDN’s hit followed two years later. But I found no evidence to support that. Nevertheless, it seems too coincidental that Abbey and Hoyt Axton, who wrote the song, correlated joy with croaking toads and frogs. Happy little critters, it seems, despite many of them destined to be dinner or objects for experimentation by high school biology students.

Joy is happiness on steroids. As such, it’s a high, an upper. Even though it’s short-lived like any high, it leaves an imprint, an indelible etching in the psyche. Like a healthy diet, it’s needed. Although Abbey wasn’t a psychologist or evolutionary scientist, he put his finger on an essential truth: There’s a strong correlation between long-term survival and one’s sense of happiness and joy. It’s from that we can meet life head on with undaunted courage.

Mum’s joy was evinced by the one Christmas song she requested. Not “Silent Night” or “Adeste Fidelis,” but “Joy to the World.” Even though her grandkids hijacked her request, we knew she felt it. We were her family. And that’s where she found joy.