Wednesday Reads: Donkey Facci

Good morning…well…when my Nana was teaching me how to speak Sicilian Italian…facci meant face. When I would sleep over at her house she would go and tell me the names of the body parts…hand = mano. When it came to her big udders…nennè = breast.

The reason I bring this up is because of the Christmas song below:

For more on this diddy:

That’s when Santa apparently calls upon Dominick the Donkey, the holiday hero immortalized in the 1960 song of the same name. Recorded by Lou Monte, “Dominick The Donkey” is a novelty song even by Christmas music standards. The opening line finds Monte—or someone else, or heck, maybe a real donkey—singing “hee-haw, hee-haw” as sleigh bells jingle in the background. A mere 12 seconds into the tune, it’s clear you’re in for a wild ride.

Over the next two minutes and 30 seconds, Monte shares some fun facts about Dominick: He’s a nice donkey who never kicks but loves to dance. When ol’ Dom starts shaking his tail, the old folks—cummaresand cumpares, or godmothers and godfathers—join the fun and “dance a tarentell,” an abbreviation of la tarantella, a traditional Italian folk dance. Most importantly, Dominick negotiates Italy’s hills on Christmas Eve, helping Santa distribute presents to boys and girls across the country.

And not just any presents: Dominick delivers shoes and dresses “made in Brook-a-lyn,” which Monte somehow rhymes with “Josephine.” Oh yeah, and while the donkey’s doing all this, he’s wearing the mayor’s derby hat, because you’ve got to look sharp. It’s a silly story made even sillier by that incessant “hee-haw, hee-haw,” which cuts in every 30 seconds like a squeaky door hinge.

There may have actually been some historical basis for “Dominick.”

“Travelling by donkey was universal in southern Italy, as it was in Greece,” Dominic DiFrisco, president emeritus of the joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans, said in a 2012 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times. “[Monte’s] playing easy with history, but it’s a cute song, and Monte was at that time one of the hottest singers in America.”

You may recognize the familiar sound of Lou Monte…he is always on soundtracks to mob movies, for many reasons.

Rumored to have been financed by the Gambino crime family, “Dominick the Donkey” somehow failed to make the Billboard Hot 100 in 1960. But it’s become a cult classic in the nearly 70 years since, especially in Italian American households.

We got some Danish sugar cookies this year, the kind that comes in the round tin containers. They taste just like my Nana’s house on Aileen Street in West Tampa. The house used to be filled with tons of those tin containers. She would store leftover food or sewing supplies…or pencils and paper…or medicines…geez, any fucking thing you can fancy…she would keep in those round tin containers.

Anyway, eating those cookies made me miss my Nana…and that made me think of the tins full of food she would bring over to our house during Christmas…which made me think of the songs we would play on the stereo. And that is why I posted about Dominick the Donkey.

I don’t have much more to say. I’m still feeling blah, just a few things for you today:

As always this is an open thread…be careful out there.