What Christmas Means To Me - lol ghosts
The original version of What Christmas Means To Me, which Stevie Wonder recorded in 1967, is one of my favourite Christmas songs. It’s just a dizzy enthusiastic list of everything he’s excited about! So festive and fun! Cover versions rarely do much for me. John Legend and Cee Lo and such just can’t pull off frenetic celebration the way 17-year-old Stevie Wonder could.
This version is trying to do something different, though. It’s from an annual Christmas Mixtape that could be yours for the price of zero dollars (“please pass along whatever monies you would've spent on this album and donate it directly to a cause that's close to your heart”). No horns here, just delicate synths and unhurried bass, and lines like:
I feel like running wild
as anxious as a little child
sound like they are being sung by tired adults rather than a hyper teenager. But they’ve extended the harmonies at the end of “all these things and more, that’s what Christmas means to me, my lo-oove” in the chorus, so that when they follow the anxiety with:
Greet you 'neath the mistletoe
kiss you once, and then some more
and wish you a Merry Christmas, baby
It sounds sweet. Romantic, even. There’s a steadiness there that reminds me of the sort of romantic love that’s become meaningful to me in the back half of my twenties. I don’t think I can access the urgent, consuming, delicious desperation of my early crushes any more, but I’m getting to know some new feelings inside my steadying emotional range. A patient appreciation, knowing that we understand each other, and ourselves, well enough to comfortably share a slice of our lives.
All these things and more,
—Tessa
PS The ending of Boulet’s amazing 24-hour comic Darkness captures the feeling I’m trying to gesture at pretty well.