Noel: I can divide my ideal Christmas playlist into the songs everyone knows (or should know), and the songs that apparently only existed on some Texaco "Holiday Favorites" LP that my Daddy Bill got with a free fill-up in 1962.
Among those in column A:
• The Waitresses, "Christmas Wrapping," which also lands in the column of songs that always make me cry, although it's not exactly sad. Something about the way the saxophone swells after poor Patty Donahue finally meets the guy she's been trying to meet all year just melts me, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.
• Vince Guaraldi, "Christmas Time Is Here," which should need no defense from me, except to say that outside of Charles Brown's Christmas blues albums, Guaraldi's is some of the most beautifully melancholy holiday music available.
• Handel's Messiah, specifically the "Unto Us" part, which I defy anyone to listen to and not hum obsessively for hours afterward.
• Donny Hathaway, "This Christmas," which is one of the few post-1970 Christmas songs that's become a standard, and for good reason—it's joyous and it swings.
• Alison Moyet, "The Coventry Carol," which updates an Anglican classic for the ethereal Britpop era.
• Lo How A Rose E'er Blooming," by anyone. That's just a hymn you can't hear enough.
And among those in column B:
• Kay Starr, "(Everybody's Waitin' For) The Man With The Bag," which got a bump back into the public consciousness with the Christmas Cocktails anthology a few years back. Ditto…
• Billy May, "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer Mambo," which shares Starr's second-cup-of-eggnog looseness. My favorite part: When one of the bandmembers hollers, "What the heck is a maaaaammm-booooo!" just before the horns come back in with that telltale "Rudolph" melody. (And let me add one more from Christmas Cocktails: Capitol Studio Orchestra's "Cha-Cha All The Way," which will have you singing, "Jingle bells, jing-jingle, cha-cha-cha" until you annoy everyone around you.)
• Lou Rawls, "Little Drummer Boy," which may be the only version of that song that isn't totally exhausting, mainly because Rawls disposes of most of the lyrics and just scats.
• Jim Reeves, "An Old Christmas Card," if only for the hilariously maudlin spoken-word interlude in which Reeves reminiscences about the first card his wife ever bought him. ("I know you must have looked through thousands of cards to find that wonderful poem that still brings a tear to my eye.")
• Jack Jones, "This Is That Time Of The Year," a completely forgotten song—I can't even find it on any Jones anthology—in which he describes the wonders of the season, from grandpa "think(ing) he's Caruso" and bellowing carols "at the spinet" to mother going to the bank and "hold(ing) out a dollar from every deposit." Much of what I love about popular culture is how it records fragments of time that even people who lived through them don't always recall, and that Jones song is like a trip into Christmas past.
But like "This Is That Time Of The Year," most of the Christmas songs that I've been listening to for almost 20 years now aren't available in stores. They're anonymous takes on songs like "What Child Is This" and "It Came Upon A Midnight Clear," recorded by some bargain version of The Anita Kerr Singers. Eleven months out of the year, they're hopeless kitsch. But for 25-odd days, it's some of the loveliest music ever made.
Keith: Okay, you're jogging my memory about some songs I like too, like "Christmas Wrapping." Only a monster doesn't love Guaraldi, and I'd like to throw Wham's "Last Christmas" into the mix if we could. But I still hold that what's hopeless kitsch—or worse—11 months out of the year doesn't improve with the season, even if I am forced to listen to it. And I think that's where we part ways. God bless us every one.
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