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Jimmy Fallon, Mariah Carey & The Roots: “All I Want For Christmas Is You” (w/ Classroom Instruments) (by latenight)
I had no particular use for this song until it was so pivotal in “Love Actually.” And now the Jimmy Fallon version is making me really happy.
This gave me my first real smile of a particularly terrible day.
The best music for Christmas is the music that turns a bad day around.
Thank you, Jimmy Fallon, The Roots, Mariah Carey, and the kids in the awesome hats.
If you don’t own Sufjan Stevens’ Christmas Album, it might just be my favorite. Unique - and very American - instrumentation, and very heartfelt singing. There’s nothing inauthentic about this music, as there often is with popular takes on sacred originals.
Today marks the first week of Advent, a week spent on Waiting. Next week, we Prepare, the following week, we Rejoice, and the final week we Hope. But this week is about Waiting.
This is not I tend to associate with Advent season, but seems to be a perfect fit.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it
Prone to leave the God I love
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it
Seal it for Thy courts above
(Source: Spotify)
Submitted by the lovely door
When I was smaller, my mom bought a Christmas music boxset somewhere, probably Costco. It became our Christmas music Holy Grail. We still trot it out each yeah, though the CDs are dying. It has a little bit of everything: Bing and Frank dueting, half of Handel’s Messiah, a rockin’ 90s “Feliz Navidad,” the Beach Boys’ “We Three Kings,” a dash of holiday novelty songs, and this: the King Singers doing “Deck the Hall.” If you know the King Singers, you know them as incredibly talented performers of old English Madrigals. There were some eye rolls the first time we heard this—it sounds like an a capella madrigal group doing Christmas. And the thing that’s so wonderful about this song is that for the first half of it, that’s what it is. But then they change it up, in a way that makes me laugh every time I hear it. I hope it makes you laugh, too!
(Source: Spotify)
Peace, Peace composed by Rick & Sylvia Powell
Everytime I hear this song in my memory, I am singing it. It is in St. Francis Church in Sacramento, California, and every cubic inch of the space is full of song. There’s a holiday concert there every year that my family would attend in the week before Christmas, and our good friend - he was always Uncle Jack - was singing in the choir.
This was the finale of the concert, and the audience was invited to sing along with something complementary. I don’t want to spoil the surprise.
This may just be my favourite version of O Holy Night ever, unfortunately I’ve now lost my mp3 of it (without any spoken word over the top) as it was on my stolen laptop. Thank goodness for youtube.
Submitted by crankyreservationist
If loving synthesized Christmas Music is wrong I don’t want to be right.
It’s mid December and you’re at a friend’s holiday party, working your way through your third eggnog (which is probably two too many after all the hot toddies you consumed before you left the house on the way to the party because it’s 34 degrees outside and you needed the extra warmth and strength to make it through the winter night but you’re not driving so it’s perfectly fine) when you hear over the hubbub of the party the faint strains of the beginning of Mannheim Steamroller starting on the holiday mix.
“Yes!” you think and do a fist bump, ready to jam down to the synthesized strains of Christmas carols as you stand by the cookie table, knowing that the adrenaline rush of nostalgia will totally burn off the calories from those four buckeyes and three frosted sugar cookies in the shape of bells that you just consumed (it’s to soak up the alcohol you tell yourself).
Suddenly, above the music and noise of the happy party comes a groan. “Oh god no, not this crappy elevator music!” Enraged, you scan the room for the Grumpy Gus or Debbie Downer who is now throwing stale apple cider all over your happy buzz. Squinting, you find them in a dark dingy corner of the otherwise warm and cheery house. With laser focus you hone in on them and, with all your drunken might, yell across the room.
“YOU GO TO HELL! YOU GO TO HELL AND YOU DIE”
Because Christmas music isn’t always about the quality of the song, it’s about the memories that it brings; of getting the Christmas tree as a family, advent dinners, the smell of baked goods, the knowledge that there are cookie tins in the pantry bursting with fudge and cherry winks, the sealed off room of the house where you go to wrap your presents and then hiding them in your room, giggling madly because you know you found just the right one. Christmas music is about being 2,000 miles away from your childhood home and crying when “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!” comes on the radio because you’re so far from home and you miss your traditions so badly. It’s about the warmth you feel when you throw your own party, knowing that you’re an adult now and you get to make your own traditions.
Shocked and startled, the music snob looks on with awe as you command your way through the throngs of friends, parting for you like the red sea (you only stumble once thanks to the glass of mulled wine that you forgot you took the moment you walked in the door). You walk up to him and size him up and stop - you wonder what music he had as a child, or if he even had the good memories that you did, of warmth and family and love and that, for one month out of the year the family got together and there were no fights and no tears despite everything that would lead up to the holiday. He’s slightly trembling now, and you reach out to him and give him a hug.
“Merry Christmas” you tell him. Because no one will ever take Mannheim Steamroller away from you, and you can’t hold hate in your heart this month.
You’ll wait ‘til New Years.
(Source: Spotify)
This isn’t, as far as I can see, a Christmas carol of any kind, but I will always associate it with the holiday for its spot on the Muppets Christmas album, and as part of Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas.
This is a song I associate with my father, who would drive us to the Sierra every year on the first Saturday in December, and we would listen to Christmas music the whole drive up, and then we’d go get a Christmas tree, usually at Little Bear Christmas Tree Farm, just outside of Alta, California.
The memory I have of this song is him singing this quietly to himself as we turned off from Interstate 80. It’s the last song on the first side of the cassette, so there was always a little pause at the end before the end of the tape would be reached, and you’d have to flip the tape. This was back in the day, yes, before auto-switchers. We’d turn the corner, he’d pause as the tape stopped, a mental pause of his own. The the tape would get flipped and Little St. Nick, sung by Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem would come on.
When I was but a babe in arms, my older sister Louisa was in an accident in our backyard, and she drowned. She spent many months in the hospital on life support, but she passed. It’s been 30+ years since that happened, but from a very early age, I connected this song to her.
There was no sense in her loss, and its consequences to our family have rippled forth even to now. But in this song, I find comfort, as I know my parents do, but it is also reminder of what is absent. And living now some 2700 miles east of my parents, it reminds me of the gap between me and them during the holidays.
It seems an odd sentiment at Christmas, but you can’t argue with Jim Henson, he knew people so well… You just can’t argue with that.
But this life will find a purpose
And in time we’ll understand
When the river meets the sea
When the river meets the almighty sea
Oh Dar Williams, I love your tale of mixed families at Christmas. I know so many mixed couples where their divided faiths have become relationship strengtheners, and this song is so perfectly emblematic of what can be so wonderful at Christmas. This is a time to celebrate something new and holy, not to draw lines in the sand and compare e-peens over dogmatic points.
There’s something particularly joyous about this song, and a recognition that Christmas time isn’t just for Christians, and that the world we share - and the faith traditions we enjoy - can and should be shared by people of all beliefs.
There’s something wonderful about the holidays at this time of the year. We all fight winter’s darkness with light. Solstice, Christmas, Diwali, they’re all central about the return of light amid the winter darkness. It’s that hopefulness that I can appreciate most this time of year.
(Source: Spotify)
Cee Lo feat. Straight No Chaser | You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch
There are some who believe that this song has only one acceptable performer - Thurl Ravenscroft. I don’t necessarily think they’re wrong. Most of the covers of this classic are at best misguided (Aimee Mann) and at worst a crime against humanity (Brian Setzer Orchestra), but this one somehow ends up ringing true.
Perhaps because Cee Lo would make a pretty awesome narrator of this Seuss tale.
Via Joe Finn comes this 1981 treasure, Christmas Wrapping by The Waitresses. The ever-amazing Wikipedia gives us this bit of tone-less genius in their synopsis:
The song is narrated from the point of view of a busy single woman who is adamant that she will try to sit out the exhausting Christmas period, and not participating in the traditional Christmas activities (except for making dinner).
She reveals that during the course of the year, she has attempted to meet up with a man she encountered in a ski shop the previous year. Despite the pair’s attempts to meet, a succession of mishaps conspires to keep them apart.
Finally on Christmas Eve, the protagonist (after boasting that A&P provided her with “the world’s smallest turkey”), in her haste to prepare dinner, realizes that she forgot to purchase cranberries. She runs to a local convenience store, and ends up running into the man. In a wild coincidence, he, too, was making dinner and also forgot to buy cranberries.
So, while the lyrics aren’t anything to write home about, the 80s guitar groove in its heart absolutely are.
(Source: Spotify)
