Lisa Finnie, Marisol Barrett release pandemic Christmas video — Submitted photo

By Bliss Bowen

Pasadena Weekly Contributor

When Altadena resident Lisa Finnie wrote a “COVID Christmas song” for her daughter in 2020, she believed it would be out of date by this year.

But the virus had other plans and, well, as she puts it, “here we are.” After hitting on the idea of illustrating it with a video, she “couldn’t see it any other way” and reached out to writer friend Marty Barrett’s daughter, 17-year-old Tujunga-based artist Marisol Barrett.

The creative collaboration between the two women yielded a storybook-style video for “Away From Home for the Holiday” (https://bit.ly/LisaFinnie) that taps into the complex emotions stirred by the season.

Finnie’s song is endearing and melancholy, qualities magnified by Barrett’s illustrations for the video: “We stowed away on Santa’s sleigh one cloudy Christmas Eve/ I know it’s hard to believe …/ We disguised ourselves as Santa’s elves and helped to make some toys/ For all the girls and boys to love.”

Chronicling how they “held on to hope and good cheer,” Finnie envisions a magical adventure grounded in the realities of the pandemic shutdown, set to a gentle melody that evokes Great American Songbook pop classics as well as the winsome jazz of the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas” soundtrack.

“Vince Guaraldi was right there with us,” Finnie said of the recording sessions with guitarists John Groover McDuffie and Dylan Thomas, acoustic bassist Randy Landas and drummer John Palmer.

“I asked John Palmer to play those brushes like that theme song. I definitely wanted to capture that melancholy jazz Christmas waltz.”

That sweet-yet-sad musical underpinning makes the song feel more immediate as the screen fills with Barrett’s charming images: a mother and child waving at friends paying drive-by visits, a young girl cradling homegrown tomatoes, relatives talking to each other on a Zoom screen, masks flying on the wings of their elastic bands.

“Lisa sent me a list of the lyrics along with a concept of the drawing she’d like to see,” Barrett recalled. “I thought it was cool that she had so many concrete ideas of what would be accompanied with each lyric because I could tell how important this project was to her. … I thought the song definitely reflected my experiences with COVID in that I missed a lot of important events and felt disconnected from my friends despite talking to them online every day. I think everyone can relate to the song a little bit.”

Estefania, Finnie’s 4-year-old daughter, has thus far been “largely ambivalent” about the video created with hopes it will become a cherished tradition for her when she’s older. “I think it’s the age,” Finnie said with a laugh. “She’s just now grasping the idea of Christmas and Santa. This is the first year she sat through and really could watch ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’”

She estimates Estefania has seen the video half a dozen times since it was published on YouTube over Thanksgiving weekend: “Now she’s starting to tell me the story, and that’s precious.”

The potential for intimidation and communication disconnects usually exists in collaborations cutting across generations and artistic mediums. But according to Barrett, who says she’s previously done “short introductory animations to skits or shows” for friends, it wasn’t an issue.

“I don’t think the differences in medium and generation between me and Lisa had any effect on the work we did together — I think it’s always helpful to work with someone younger or older than you at some point to refresh your perspective on your own artistic process,” she observed. “Music serves as pretty good inspiration for me, so listening to Lisa perform in her own medium helped me work with mine as well.”

“The experience wasn’t so much ‘I’m working with this young person’ as it was ‘I’m working with this professional who’s being patient with me,’” Finnie said, laughing. “One clear generational difference is the medium, because I wanted it to look like a sketch; illustrations on paper was my vision for this, like a hand-illustrated book. Marisol did all of that sketching on a digital pad so there was some adjustment. She’s an aspiring animator and some slides in the beginning looked like classic Disney cels. … She just rose to that occasion. She took my requests for edits, of which there were many, completely in stride and graciously. (Until the final walk-through), the entire project was done via text and email and phone conversation” in six weeks.

Known to radio listeners as the host of KCSN’s “The Dylan Hours” for the past 15 years, Finnie grew up in Pasadena’s Upper Hastings Ranch neighborhood and cherishes memories of her father being a block captain for their street’s annual Christmas light displays and her mother entertaining friends. Finnie, a single mother, says she is donating a portion of proceeds from sales of the song on Bandcamp (https://bit.ly/FinnieBandcamp) to Five Acres (5acres.org), the nonprofit agency that helped facilitate her adoption of Estefania. Since the happiest memories of her own childhood are Christmas memories (“It was a happy house, lots of cookie making”), she now feels “the pull and the desire to make that true in this house as well.”

But for all the joy the holiday season can bestow, it can also be isolating. That’s particularly true for single parents striving to secure a nontraditional family structure on solid ground amid the primary-color shine and noise of tradition-steeped celebrations. Melancholy is embedded in Christmas and its carols, thanks to pre-Christian winter rituals and festivals, and the blue notes in “Away from Home for the Holidays” resonate with gray moods and knotty emotions.

“It’s definitely something that goes on under the surface,” Finnie acknowledged with feeling. “Being a parent, single or no — but single, certainly, because I get to be a mom and dad — it’s quite a challenge sometimes to provide the support that my child needs and at the same time keep it together.”

All of that was unavoidably complicated by the shutdown and the ongoing pandemic: “That’s really what’s been the challenge for everybody: single people, couples without kids, and families all across the board. How do we acknowledge what’s happening, and how do we keep it from taking away all of our cheer? We are doing the best to make it through the pandemic with our heads up and our hearts full because we are actively doing things to keep ourselves productive and busy.”

That informed scenes and subtle details in the video, including equations on a chalkboard that humorously paraphrase Descartes (“Santa thinks = he is”) while addressing the fundamental question of what makes us happy.

“If this is where we are together, what is keeping us afloat?” Finnie mused. “Things like love, homegrown tomatoes, socially distanced pop-bys from our friends — we owe so much to our friends for staying in contact with us, it meant so much. This video is really a love letter to those people.”

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Lisa Finnie, Marisol Barrett release pandemic Christmas video