Holiday Cheer, Straight Up

Amy Grant buys right into the idyllic vision of Christmas cheer that most Americans cherish. For the second consecutive December, the perennially popular singer is mounting a large-scale Christmas tour, aiming to put a glow of hearth and home into cavernous hockey arenas across the land.

Grant’s list of ingredients for an ideal Christmas rings with Rockwellian familiarity.

“A Christmas tree decorated by children, a fire in the fireplace with lots of embers, something good to drink, and Nat King Cole on the stereo,” says the Nashville-based singer, whose “An Amy Grant Christmas” tour brings her and co-stars Michael W. Smith and CeCe Winans to the Pond of Anaheim on Saturday.

“I try to take that feeling into arenas. We have too many people on stage for a lot of props,” she adds, alluding to the headliners’ backing band and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. “We can’t have a fire and Christmas tree. But you have the space in people’s heads. I love providing settings where people are moved, or a setting that’s meaningful.”

Grant, 37, also recognizes, and embraces, the less idyllic realities of the season. “It’s such a hard time for a lot more people than you would imagine. The expectation and reality come crashing into each other on every level--financially, emotionally, spiritually. ‘Peace on earth, goodwill to men.’ Then you look at your life and think, ‘OK, explain this to me.’ But that’s the beauty of it.”

Grant began her recording career in 1977 and soon became the darling of contemporary Christian music. Since the late 1980s, she has reached out to a broader, mainstream audience while maintaining a spiritual current that can appeal to her original fans.

One rap on Grant was that her songs were bright but insubstantial, and that when she did delve into more troubled zones of experience, she pointed to faith and salvation as an easy out. Her 1997 album, “Behind the Eyes,” seemed intent on addressing those criticisms, with its muted production and somber reflections closer to the pang-filled balladry of Bonnie Raitt or Sheryl Crow than to the dance-pop gleam and celebratory mood of her two biggest multi-platinum successes, “House of Love” and “Heart in Motion.”

It was a departure, Grant says, but not a renunciation of her upbeat, affirmative side.

“The love of celebrating and smiling is just as intense in me as [being] serious and contemplating. I don’t think I’m going to be a voice of heavy thought for the rest of my life. Half the fun of a really sad song like ‘Somewhere Down the Road’ [the deep lament that ends ‘Behind the Eyes’] is singing it back to back with ‘Baby Baby’ [her insouciant pop hit from 1992]. That’s how life goes.”

Grant’s Christmas show will be long on holiday standards and selections from the two Christmas albums she has released. There’s a brief sequence when she, Smith and Winans cover some of their hits.

She says her favorite moment in the show is the one in which the singers take a rest and an oboe soloist performs “Gabriel’s Oboe” from the film score for “The Mission,” giving the audience a chance to experience the contemplative side of Christmas.

“At that point, I invite people who came to the show to think about whatever--people they love, moments they cherish, the faces they don’t see anymore. For all the great Christmas lyrics, I think that moment of nobody singing [is the show’s most worthwhile]. It gives everybody who fought the traffic and the Christmas list a chance to take a breath and remember what they want to remember.”

Grant began putting on annual charity shows at Christmas in Nashville, her hometown, in 1993. The series has raised more than $1 million for the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, which had declared bankruptcy in 1988.

She took the concept on the road last year for a 19-city tour. This year’s 21-city itinerary brings her Christmas show to the West Coast for the first time. It’s a for-profit tour, but Grant is donating part of the proceeds to children’s charities.

One of Grant’s most powerful Christmas memories also goes back five years:

“My grandmother’s health was failing, and we all got together the night before Christmas and sang songs, played guitar, did the goofy version of ‘Partridge in a Pear Tree.’ We were just shutting things down and my grandmother said, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do “When the Saints Go Marching In.” ’ “

Grant demurred on that standard selection about mortality and heavenly rewards. “I said, ‘Nanny, I promise you next year we’ll do “When the Saints Go Marching In.” ’ She died five days later. We were all outside [the house] and my oldest sister, Cathy, was teary, and all of a sudden she starts laughing: ‘When we plan the music for the funeral, you know what it has to be.’ This is the way of life in a family, always somebody being born or dying.”

Hence, Grant says, she doesn’t keep score on good and bad Christmases, but takes them as a continuum within life. “I don’t go, ‘ ‘68 was fabulous, ’85 was awful.’ It’s all in there.”

As a mother of three children, ages 6 to 11, Grant says she has no special wisdom to impart on the Christmas dilemma of how much is too much when it comes to gift giving. But experience has taught her the importance of a good presentation.

“One year we were just so busy, Gary [husband and fellow musician Gary Chapman] and I didn’t wrap anything. So we just made these piles for each of the kids. They came down, and it was the biggest letdown. They said, ‘Where are the presents?’ For them it was all about the wrapping paper. It was a huge lesson for me.”

When her older children, Matt and Millie, were very young, Grant sneaked a couple of simple gifts--a plastic sword and a doll--into their room so they could discover them when they awoke on Christmas morning. The children were ecstatic.

“We’ve got a living room filled with toys downstairs and they’re thinking, ‘This is Christmas, this is actually enough.’ I think there’s nothing worse than giving your children too much. Basically, you just numb them to the beauty of a gift.

“There’s nothing better than really anticipating something and then getting it. I try to find out what they would really like, and when I get that, use some self-control. And use a lot of wrapping paper.”

BE THERE

Amy Grant, with Michael W. Smith and CeCe Winans, Saturday at the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim, 2695 E. Katella Ave. 8 p.m. $29.50-$45. (714) 704-2500.