This jolly song has been waiting for a while to find its place in one of my Christmas music samplers. Back in my thematic CD days it was going to go into the thematic rotation as what I thought of as one of my children’s-Christmas-albums-for-grownups. In fact, this is the year when that category would have come up in the cycle.
One problem that it poses for me is that I know very little about the song. I don’t comprendez français very well (let alone français in an Acadian dialect), and the only information that I can find online about it is in that language. I got this song from a charitable fund-raising Christmas music album that I found in a thrift store. The album, called Noël chez nous / Christmas from Home, had been compiled by the Saint Boniface General Hospital Auxiliary in Winnipeg. It includes good selections in both English and in French that had been contributed by many top-tier Canadian performers. But I don’t know when the album was compiled, and its liner notes only name the principal performers without giving further information about the songs (such as when they were recorded and what source album they come from.)
The liner notes do say that Le Noël des legumes is performed here by Édith Butler, who it describes as “grande ambassadrice de la musique acadienne, avec une joi de vivre sans reserve.” At least my French is good enough to piece that together, possibly even correctly. Finding her Wikipedia entry confirmed the “grande ambassadrice” part of that: She has a master’s degree in literature and traditional ethnography and is perhaps the foremost promoter of Acadian contemporary and folk music. She was appointed an officer of the Order of Canada in 1975, only five years after her professional career was begun, and even has a postage stamp issued in her honour! Here is her website translated into English by Google.
With simple online research I found that this song about vegetables’ Christmas was written by Édith in collaboration with Jacqueline Lemay. But I haven’t found an English translation of the song’s lyrics so I still don’t know what vegetables do at Christmastime and why vegetables seem to be pretty happy about the holiday.
