The most wonderful time of the year...

watercolor of a group of red squirrels in santa hats

Hello everyone, apologies for my absence. (After a lovely Thanksgiving, I came home and was ill for ten days, throwing off all my deadlines: very tedious indeed).

For this Christmas edition, I asked the image generator to give me red squirrels in santa hats: that it chose to add a baby squirrel in a slightly-too-large hat is adorable. I’m tempted to save the pic and have it printed for cards in the future.

I’ve written in the past about Christmas meals, Yule logs, and a visit to the relics of St Nicholas. This year my cooking efforts for Christmas involved making my own marrons glacé (NB: peeling chestnuts can ruin your manicure), and baking triple ginger muffins. There will be an attempt to roast a pheasant tomorrow.

For this year I wanted to write about Christmas songs. The great thing about Christmas songs is that the genre is actually multiple genres. There are songs for children (Rudolph, Frosty the Snowman), songs for everyone (Carol of the Bells, It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, White Christmas). Then there are sexy songs for grownups (Baby Please Come Home, Santa Baby, All I Want For Christmas is You, What are you doing New Years Eve?). Other songs are really just about winter and not really about Christmas at all (Sleigh Ride and Let it Snow don’t even mention Christmas; Jingle Bells was originally written for Thanksgiving).

What’s interesting about these sub-genres is we have a bunch of classics and very few new additions to what may be called the “Christmas Songbook”. I’d argue Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You is the only standard written in the last 30 years - and that was 29 years ago.

By “standard” I mean a song that will be recorded by many other artists, and popping up on Christmas albums and at high school concerts for years to come. A song that will become part of the songbook.

Popular artists come out with Christmas songs, but they are so linked to that particular performer’s recording they won’t become standards in the same way (I don’t think Christmas in Hollis or Fairytale of New York are going to be on a Michael Bublé album, let alone performed by teenage a capella groups). Mariah Carey’s song managed to be the platonic ideal of a Christmas classic: performable by anyone, and seemingly timeless from the get-go.

This year, the Christmas number 1 in the UK, is Wham’s Last Christmas. It’s also high on the Billboard chart. A song released in 1986. It’s amusing that this pop song has generated such a cult following (it’s not even Wham or George Michael’s best song). But it’s so commonly played at Christmas that it has generated a game: “Whamageddon”. The game is simple: how long can you go without hearing it?. People lose when it comes on the radio, or is blasted out on the system at the sports event they’re watching.

It is possible, I suppose, to avoid hearing Christmas songs you don’t want to, as long as you work from home, shop online, and never turn on tv or venture near a mall or an airport or anyone else’s house. (The perfect distillation of Christmas in the 2020s).

Perhaps the song attracts so much attention because it’s polarizing. People either think it’s an awesome song, or absolutely stupid (I admit to being in the latter camp, though it doesn’t raise my hackles as much as some). It’s probably also nostalgia. It’s been around for as long as many of us can remember.

But for my money the best Christmas song released in the 1980s is this one:

The Waitresses: Christmas Wrapping

So Merry Christmas readers, and see you soon!

(For those of you still in last minute shopping chaos, I’m also in JSTOR Daily today, with a piece about that consumerist emblem: the shopping cart).