I’m not crying, you’re crying.
This time last year, Cody Johnson shared a clip from his “CMT CoJo Christmas show,” special in which he tells a touching story about one of his first Christmas’ with his wife Brandi.
Cody starts the clip by detailing just how broke the newlywed couple was at the time -“We were very broke. Like broke, broke. Like, ramen noodles was a luxury kind of broke.“
He then describes how the pair went to visit his parents house for the holidays, explaining how he innocently put $20 into a Christmas card, not realizing just how dire their financial issues were:
“I didn’t know this at the time, but that was our last $20 for the rest of the month.”
Brandi eventually helped set CoJo straight on the car ride home, where he finally realized just how bad things had gotten:
:So here we are, I’ve got three quarters of a tank of gas and that’s it. That’s all we had to our name.:
In what could only have been one of the most uncertain times in their young lives, a country legend came on the radio…
“We drove home and Merle Haggard’s “If We Make It Through December” comes on the radio. And Merle always had a way of making people cry, and in the truck we both cried, and we were wondering how we were gonna actually make it through December to the next year. “
At this point in the clip, the camera cuts back and forth between Cody and a clearly emotional Brandi in the crowd. She appears to be fighting back tears as Cody tells what happened next. After the two got home and unpacked the leftovers, Cody decided to head to the mailbox.
“For some reason I checked the mail. I walked out to the end of the drive way, and checked the mail. And my first two songwriter checks from ASCAP came in, and they were $2500 apiece.”
At this point, Brandi couldn’t seem to hold back the emotions any longer, and the camera caught a beautiful moment of her wiping away tears. Holding true to the story, Cody tells that they had the only natural reaction to the good news:
“And I walked in the house, and we cried again. And then we pushed the couch up close to the TV, and we heated up leftovers, and we watched ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ and we cried again.“
Following the conclusion of the story, Cody leads into a cover of Merle’s song. You can watch the clip of CoJo telling the story, as well as the full performance of “If We Make It Through December” below.