Driving Home for Christmas - Sugarcane feat. Molly Graham
This is a fun bossa-nova-ish take on Driving Home for Christmas, which is a modern Christmas classic… in a few European countries. As of this writing, Chris Rea’s original is #4 on the German singles chart, and #22 in the UK, its country of origin. I like that December’s inescapable grocery-store soundtrack differs between countries, but I find it a bit funny that a song about driving is significantly more popular in Europe?
I was living in Paris last year, and my first time returning to North America to visit, I was struck by how much time I spent in cars. A fact that seems sort of unreal to me is I only rode in a car in France twice in the nine months I lived there. (This seems so unrealistic, writing to you from my native side of the Atlantic, that I looked through my rideshare app history to make sure I wasn’t forgetting any.) I came back to North America and going places suddenly involved driving*.
I have a lot of memories of sitting in the back of a car around Christmastime, anticipating a few nights with my grandparents in Kitchener, gazing out the window and waiting to see the smiling Schneiders Sign that meant we were getting near their house. I wonder if that will become a generational thing; it seems impossible to imagine that the TTC and GO could lay down enough tracks that going places no longer involves driving… but maybe that’s too unambitious? I look at this Twitter thread of Barcelona superblocks and the “after” photos feel like they must be AI-generated, or overoptimistic architectural renders, but they’re pictures of a real city.
I also wonder how much quiet gazing-out-of-windows there will be in future cars. Most people wouldn’t feel safe in a car without a human driver, but it seems like self-driving cars might already be safer? It’s hard to be sure; we only have coarse statistics for how often human drivers crash their cars, but we know drunk drivers, teenagers, and elderly people cause most crashes, so self-driving cars would have to crash at a much lower rate than a national average to be on par with a typical human driver. I know we’re at a lower point of the hype cycle on self-driving cars than we were 10 years ago, but imagine driving home for Christmas and playing a board game with your parents while the family electric car drives itself down the highway? I hope we get more car-free cities, but I also hope the experience of being in a car becomes freer.
I can’t wait to see,
- Tessa
* There’s more than geography to this story; I imagine people in rural France use cars for their grocery shopping, and obviously not everyone can haul their groceries on foot. But also… I saw a large number of octogenarians pushing bundle buggies past terrasses, and I visited Augy, a town of about 1000, by taking a train and then biking 15 minutes. The train had hooks for storing bikes.