SOUL FOOD:Where can you find what Christmas really looks like?

Everywhere I go this holiday season, I seem to hear the song, “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas.”

Though it ranks only No. 19 among the most-played holiday song tracks of the past five years, according a chart published by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, it must be the No. 1 song of this year.

It’s become what an acquaintance of mine calls a “mind worm.” It’s wormed its way into my mind and locked itself in.

I hear the song now even when no one’s playing it. So as I was driving the freeways the other day, with my brain being hammered by the song’s refrain, it made me wonder: What exactly does Christmas look like?

I’d say not as much the way when Perry Como first recorded the Meredith Willson tune in 1951. Some of its lyrics — like “Take a look in the five-and-ten/Glistening once again/With candy canes and silver lanes aglow” for instance — speak of relics from a time so long ago that many contemporary listeners no longer have so much as a vague idea what they’re referring to.

No doubt, though, at least here in the United States, Christmas still has something to do with “toys in ev’ry store” and decorated pine trees.

In my neighborhood, it also looks like lights — lots and lots of lights — and lots of inflatable … uh … sculptures? Blown up and lighted after dark, they portray snowmen and Santas — be they skating, dancing or waving — and even a Winnie-the-Pooh sitting merrily on his hunny pot sporting a Santa’s cap and clutching a candy cane.

Hey, Pooh has as much right as anyone to put on a bit of holiday cheer.

These and a lot of the trappings of Christmas serenaded in the popular holiday musical chestnuts of the past 50-some years have a lot more to do with winter and other traditions than they actually have to do with Christmas.

That is, with Christmas in the religious sense.

“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” is No. 1 on the ASCAP chart. And among the rest are jingles like “Winter Wonderland,” “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,” “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” “Jingle Bell Rock,” “Sleigh Ride,” “Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty The Snowman,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas” and “Santa Baby.”

You won’t find much to do with Christmas or — as it was long ago better known among Christians — the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. (Among Eastern Orthodox Christians here and the world over, the occasion is still known by this more ancient and accurate name.)

Of ASCAP’s top 25 songs, only the familiar “The Little Drummer Boy” has anything to do with the birth of Jesus. “Come they told me, pa rum pum pum pum,” the ballad begins, “A newborn King to see, pa rum pum pum pum; Our finest gifts we bring, pa rum pum pum pum; To lay before the King … “

For all the ranting in recent years about a “War on Christmas,” Christmas hasn’t for most of the last century looked — or sounded — a lot like anything remotely religious. And it would seem Christians, as much as anybody, are as responsible for that.

After all, more than 80% of us, according to numerous surveys (including the American Religious Identification Survey, the National Survey of Religious Identification and the most recent Baylor Survey of Religion) identify ourselves as Christians.

Surely, it wasn’t the other mere 20% who turned Christmas into a season of mind-numbing ditties, gluttony and shameless spending.

In the places I’ve lived outside the United States, Christmas doesn’t look like much. Germans have Christmas trees. After all, it’s said the tradition started there, and Martin Luther is credited with being the first to bring the Christmas symbol indoors and decorate it with candles.

And then there is St. Nicolaus, although he’s nothing like our derivative known as Santa Claus. He’s not associated with Weihnachten or Christfest, as Christmas is called in German. He appears instead on Dec. 6., the saint’s day of the legendary, compassionate and generous Nicolaus, the Bishop of Myra.

In Nuremberg, there is the Christkindlmarkt, probably the most commercial aspect of Christmas. An outdoor market that draws many tourists, it remains by our standards terribly quaint, selling sausages, confections, mulled wine and traditional crafts of the season such as Swetschgermännla, dolls made from dried plums.

In Israel, apart from a rare artificial tree occasionally spotted in an apartment window in the then-largely Christian city of Nazareth, there was scarcely any outward sign of Christmas at all. If gifts were exchanged, they were small and often foods: oranges, nuts, small cakes perhaps.

In Tel Aviv, the most noticeable decoration near the season of Christmas was a billboard-size menorah at the north entrance to the city. The Israelis called it a Hanukkiah, a special menorah for lighting during Hanukkah.

Tel Aviv’s huge Hanukkiah became my Christmas tree that year. Each evening as another of its candles was lighted, I would feel Christmas draw a little closer.

That Christmas had no carols playing in every store for a month before. There were no lights hanging from the eves of neighborhood homes. Shoppers didn’t clog the streets and sidewalks in pursuit of the perfect gift.

It was, I thought, a lot like the real event so long ago must have been.

Nothing looked the least exceptional. Certainly nothing looked a lot like any Christmas I’d ever seen. To see Christmas that year, I had to look in my own heart and soul.

That is, I found, where we discover not what Christmas looks like but what Christmas really is.