For many the Christmas season is not all merry and bright, but laced with an emotional weight that at times can be overwhelming. Those challenging emotions prompted a Cabell County musician, Parry Casto, to compose a different kind of Christmas song.
Casto is a Cabell County public school teacher, a concert promoter and a musician who leads the funk band MFB. He said he’s never been a fan of the consumerism that surrounds the Christmas holiday.
“It was kind of focused on Mariah Carey’s Christmas song,” Casto said. “Just kind of how plastic and kind of fake it is. I mean, I get why people love it. But I kind of tasked myself to write a Christmas song. I didn’t want to write a fake kind of everything’s joyful.”
He said this musical composition, titled “I just want to be alive on Christmas day,” takes a thoughtful approach in the opposite direction.
“It explores the struggle and the mental health issues,” Casto said. “Or possibly somebody that has a terminal illness, possibly somebody that could be experiencing loneliness, or possibly dealing with substance issues or being in recovery.”
Casto said the holiday and winter months are among the highest risk periods for individuals in recovery. He noted that increased family strain, financial pressure, isolation, seasonal affective symptoms, and emotional overload all contribute to heightened difficulty and relapse risk. His lyrics go in two directions that highlight what many of us witness in our daily lives.
The song says, “You see a person hurting, but you turn your head and agree that maybe it’s their problem. That’s the way it should be. And they’ll get over it in due time. But you know they’re looking for some comfort. Looking for some company.”
Casto said this part of the song hopefully offers some people a new perspective on what’s going on when someone is in need.
“They see people that are maybe homeless, or they’re actively struggling with dependency or something like that,” he said. “People that we see normally and then we just kind of turn our heads and think ‘I’ve got my own problems,’ and they move on. They think, ‘They’ll get through this.’”
For many struggling with substance abuse disorder, ‘getting through this’ is easier said than done. Casto acknowledges that the theme, ‘I just want to be alive on Christmas day’ is dark. But he says the bridge, expressing ‘I don’t know if I can make it. I don’t know if I can shake it, please Lord, don’t forsake me’ offers lightness and hope.
“There’s optimism there, and this person wants to live,” Casto says. “This person doesn’t want to die. This person wants to be there for their family, or they want to be there for their friends, or they want to be there for themselves. They want to be there for another day.”
As a fourth grade teacher in Huntington’s West End, Casto said he sees the challenges his Christmas song tackles every day.
“The landscape has changed so much since the opioid epidemic and it still reverberates,” Casto said.”It’s not over. We’re dealing with broken families. We’re dealing with grandparents. We’re dealing with single parent issues. We’re dealing with parents actively in either recovery or still in the grip of addiction. It’s very present.”
Perry Casto is marketing his Christmas song on social media, with all proceeds made until March 1st going to helping two local organizations, Recovery Point West Virginia and Healing Appalachia. He said the funds will support peer recovery programs and music-based therapeutic resources.
“I’m all for any sort of music-based type of therapy where they would use actual music to help people that are in recovery,” he said. “I don’t know exactly the details of how they do that, but I’m all for it because I’m a big proponent of music just being a part of people’s lives in any possible way.”
Casto has paired “I just want to be alive on Christmas Day” with another original composition, “It’s a Beautiful Day.” For details on both songs, click here.
