It’s coming on Christmas, as Joni Mitchell begins the song River, and everybody's having fun, as Slade noted in Merry Xmas Everybody. The lights are burning brightly everywhere, as Mariah Carey sings – although not in our house, partly because we’re saving electricity and the planet, and partly because we don’t play any Carey here.
From mistletoe and trees to Santa and Jack Frost, there can be nary a Christmas cliché that has not been immortalised in song, while a good many traditions began in them. Nat King Cole put chestnuts on every Christmas hearth. Rudolph’s nose would never have gone down in history so brightly had singing cowboy Gene Autry not turned Robert L. May’s 1930s poem into a hit single in 1949; Autry then returned in 1950 to bring us Frosty the Snowman. Did anyone bet on the likelihood of a White Christmas before Irving Berlin’s song was crooned into our collective mind?
Probably, yes, actually, but you get my point. Whether it’s The Nutcracker Suite, Deck The Halls or Wombling Merry Christmas, music and the festive season are thoroughly intertwined and co-supportive. How could we dress the Christmas tree without sleigh bells jing-jing-jingling courtesy of Ray Conniff and his Singers? How could we stir the sixpences into the pudding without Winter Wonderland on the wireless keeping our spirits up even as the garbage bags pile high in the slushy streets outside?
Sorry, I seem to have regressed to my childhood there; these days people probably mount their tree fairies during Taylor Swift parties, and if they have a Christmas pudding it’s by Heston Blumenthal and has a hidden mandarin in it. And of course, I’m living in the wonderful world of Oz now, where it’s prawns at the beach anyway, or a BBQ [our sub-editors shudder] in the backyard, and everyone here will be pumping out the Christmas tunes on their big IP67-rated Bluetooth speakers. Loudly, all day, probably.
And that’s fine by me. One of the things I love about Australia is its attitude to bothering people with music, which is generally to assume you aren’t, unless and until someone says you are. During my backpacker days, I was once drifting serenely [drug reference removed] across Pokhara Lake gazing up at the sunlight shimmering on the snow peaks of the Himalayas, when suddenly music began nasally whining out across the water from another boat drifting similarly languorously a long way off. I didn’t much mind, being extraordinarily chilled at that point, and in any case someone somewhere yelled over at them after a while and the music went off.
My point being that I would never have dreamed of doing that, which I mentioned to the guys from the boat when I met them later – Australians, it turned out, sagely explaining to me their ‘do now, apologise later’ ethos. This was refreshing to a Brit like me, raised to assume that you’re always likely to be bothering someone, so it’s best to do nothing at all, really. I much prefer the more active Australian presumption, which may come from each having a little more space in which to make their noises, or from a general national tendency to shove it up anyone and everyone anyway.
Which means down here in the Antipodes there’ll be even more music out and about, loud and proud, through the Christmas period. The supermarkets began running the classics weeks ago, and the streaming services are alive with special playlists, as well as offering this year’s brand-new seasonal releases, which include, let’s see, Justin Bieber, Michael Bublé, John Legend and – oh! Mariah Carey, what joy. If that’s not to your taste perhaps add some of Jimmy Fallon’s Holiday Seasoning album? Or more temptingly, The Temptations’ Give Love at Christmas from 1980, one of several reissues for this season, toweringly topped by Ella & Louis Wish You a Swinging Holiday. (That one is streaming to me right now and is cooler than a sleepover in Jukkasjärvi’s Ice Hotel.)
But many will prefer their own holiday favourites, and those who still maintain healthy collections of ye olde discs, whether silver or oil-byproduct-black, will be riffling through their racks for those once-a-year-only discs, be it an old vinyl LP of Elvis’ Christmas Album, or an overplayed copy of the magnificent Rockwiz Christmas CD.
My own collection of Christmas favourites was once carefully curated on cassette, but since my last idler wheel gave out I had avoided moving to either disc or stream for the festive theme, instead using a Christmas playlist built from tunes ripped into my music archive, from all the many CDs which are now neatly out of the way in labelled boxes. Wife Dee often remarks that all these boxed-up CDs could easily be cleared out now, since they’re ripped at CD quality, but this is a misguided perception; the CDs are my final physical backup for digital music when the great EM pulse attack arrives or, perhaps more likely, when I lose my rips in some fatal self-inflicted data catastrophe. Thankfully wife Dee’s second favourite option is to take charge of finding all the required storage boxes to fit CDs and 7-inch singles, a task she finds almost as thrilling as throwing things out. We do work well together.
Playing out of season
So, anyway, there is one problem with Christmas songs. Well, no, of course there are many problems with many Christmas songs (aren’tcha sick of ’em?, etc), and perhaps this is less a problem, more a particular property: you don’t want to hear them for the rest of the year. With the sole exception of Fairytale of New York, all Christmas songs – yes, even Wombling Merry Christmas – should be returned to a secure box that is time-locked until the following December 1st, not to be opened even for the supermarkets and especially not by numpties who have Christmas-in-July fondue parties. No, there should be no Christmas songs till next Christmas.
Streaming services are quite good at this, no doubt using some AI brilliance to screen out inappropriately festive fare, although I have been served kinda-Christmas songs (The Frog Chorus, Frankie’s Power of Love etc) mid-year when enjoying an artist shuffle. After all, it would be hard to offer a comprehensive 'Best of Wizzard' playlist without including I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday. (Sic: Everyday there, wrongly compounded; this is a pet peeve of mine, sorry… As any fule kno, ‘every day’ is one word only if used adjectivally, as in ‘it’s an everyday occurrence’. Slade did the same thing with their song Everyday in 1974, but then Slade were renowned for playfully misspelling song titles, so they will probably claim it was deliberate, once I get all this into the courts.)
So here’s the problem: when I’ve ripped all my music and I’m playing from files, how do I stop those Christmas hits from popping up randomly later? I do quite like a bit of random shuffle as a break from curated albums, but I don’t want Greg Lake jingling in Father Christmas in the middle of April (though I did play it ‘out of season’ recently when lyricist Pete Sinfield died).
Anyway, in the end I took steps to isolate my Christmas songs by keeping them out of the system completely. The best way to do this, I decided, is to keep them physically separated. So I’ve exhumed the best few Christmas CDs from storage, and I am playing them old-style, mainly in Blu-ray players, sorry (CD players are better for CDs, with the correct colour laser), but nevertheless filling the air with festive cheer until wife Dee says ‘yeh that’s enough’ and wants to watch a murder show.
Come Boxing Day I will stow my Christmas CDs away, hidden behind some more regularly played discs, and I’ve written this article partly to help me remember where I’ve put them – they’re behind the 2L Atmos discs, if you could remind me next December 1st? Thank you.
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