Full Rainbow - Tim Baker (mp3)

Merry (midnight of) Christmas! This song is generously earnest, a little beam of contemplation shining upon the new year, and I knew I had to put it on the mix when I listened to the chorus:

Love, let me see you
Love, let me see you again
Let me see right through you like a lens,
and then let me see everything again

This points at something I want from love. In several wedding cards this year, I have excerpted a section of The Third Thing, Donald Hall’s essay remembering his marriage, which describes that concept of a “third thing” thus:

We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.

Driving Home for Christmas - AUIIRA (mp3)

This is a warm lofi version of Driving Home for Christmas, a popular 1986 British carol about the shared experience of being stuck in traffic with everyone else traversing red lights and freeways to see their people. Its lyrics (omitted from this version) include the quite lovely egalitarian line: I take a look at the driver next to me; he’s just the same, he’s driving home.

I spent the most hours in a car today of any day in 2025. Starting around 11:00am, we (mostly Oberon) drove almost without stopping for six hours, my dad and brother in the backseat, napping and passing forward snacks. We’d spent the night with my uncle and had breakfast with my brother’s best friend. In the Montréal morning, we spent five minutes brushing the new snow off my mum’s car before we could set out. When we arrived in Toronto, my dad went home, and my mum took the wheel to drive to Waterloo for an evening with a different set of cousins, ultimately returning to Toronto after midnight. All told, I spent nearly 10 hours driving or riding in the car, which is a very North American way to spend Christmas Eve.

I love road trips. I grew up downtown, with easy access to streetcars and subways, and didn’t get my driver’s license until Zach required it as a precondition of going on road trips together. My family didn’t own a car until I was 10 or so, but long drives in borrowed or rented cars were a huge part of my childhood. So many hours curled against the backseat window, sleepily making up stories about the lights and landscapes we passed by. This song called to mind that feeling for me; the safe lull of the engine, the sudden brightness of the gas station, pretending to be asleep so my parents would carry me inside when we arrived.

Who Took The Merry Out of Christmas? - The Staple Singers (mp3)

I really love the way this song opens, flute and tambourine trills and humming, then a killer stanza:

Who took the merry out of Christmas?
People all over the world forgot about merry!
Too busy fighting wars, trying to make it to Mars
Searching for light and can’t seem to find the right star

I am a busy person who is not always sure that I have found the right star to navigate by as I fling my small efforts towards the gaping inadequacy of the world.

Holidays - Winten (mp3)

Breakup songs are an important subgenre of Christmas music; this song is less playful than Coeur de Pirate’s Parfait Noël, less wistful than The Staves’ Home Alone, Too, and less gentle than Jenny Owen Youngs’ Maybe Next Year. It captures some of how I've felt about the two breakups of my thirties, each marking the painful and confusing end of a long-term relationship:

It is confusing, I knew you deeply, now we are nothing

sympathy 4 the grinch - 100 gecs (mp3)

I recognize that hyperpop glitch ska will not be everyone’s microgenre, but this materialistic grievance/mischief bop about robbing Santa’s sleigh captures an anti holiday spirit that I have sympathy for, even if I’m not sure I like it:

Done being jolly, time to be naughty
Think it's time we settle up the score
…
I’ve been good for way too long
Gonna get the shit I want

This hook reminds me of Lockpick Pornography, a foundational text of my adolescence. Even then, I suspected I wouldn’t like the protagonists if I met them, but there was an appeal to the gonzo genderpunk freedom they represented. Very much “not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you”. One of the opening paragraphs:

Carol of the Banjos - Beta Radio (mp3)

A short but sweet banjo-led cover of Carol of the Bells. I don’t have much commentary to add to the arrangement (do you like banjos and/or chimes? you will like this) so I’ve decided to share a bit of history with you instead.

i. of the Bells

The tune of this carol is Mykola Leontovych’s 1916 choral arrangement of Shchedryk, a traditional Ukrainian new year’s song. It was one of the arrangements that Leontovych worked on for the Ukrainian national choir that toured around Europe and North America from 1919 to 1926 with the aim of creating awareness of Ukraine’s historical and cultural traditions and thus sympathy for Ukrainian independence. According to this article: “[the] strategy of musical diplomacy won the country some hard-earned recognition; in many venues, concertgoers led chants of ‘long live Ukraine!’”

Yuletide - TURBOCHRISTMAS (mp3)

This band is a project of friends-of-friends who started recording Christmas songs together during the pandemic depths of 2020 and have released an original holiday song (sometimes several!) each year since. Earlier tonight, I got to see them play this song live!

Oh, baby, it’s you-ooo-ooo-ooo-uletide; a little something cozy to come warm me up inside.

I’ll Be Your Santa Baby - Rufus Thomas (mp3)

This is sort of a genderflipped Santa Baby, though arguably it’s more of a gender vector projection of Santa Baby, remapping its suggestiveness from feminine to masculine. Not I’ve been an awful good boy, but I'll be your Santa baby, playing lots and lots of games / when I've toyed with you baby, things won't be the same.

One of the first things I read about gender/sexuality on my own, rather than in school or via my parents, was the opening section of a Kate Bornstein book. I’ve mostly forgotten the book, which was about suicide prevention for teenagers, but the first chapter is vivid in my mind. Bornstein writes: 

Imagine the world as a place where anyone can safely and even joyfully express themselves the way they’ve always wanted to… Envision yourself as the kind of person who lives happily and contentedly in that world. What gives you pleasure? What components of your identity allow for that pleasure? How many components of that envisioned identity can you put in place in your real life in order to achieve real pleasure?

Boum Boum (Merry little Christmas!) - Sped Up - Maryse Letarte (mp3)

I am old enough that I still prefer to do this newsletter as mp3s because it's “cross-platform” or whatever, and I couldn’t find a way to buy an mp3 of this song, which I’m pretty sure I first came across via an algorithmically-generated spotify “song radio” of a different chanson de noël.

If I were younger, maybe I would have recognized “sped up” as a tiktok remix style; a lot of viral audios are pop songs that have been sped up in an app like capcut; if you watch shortform video content, you’ve probably heard some of these (I do and I had, though I know short videos are bad for me). Record labels are now releasing official sped up versions, which if nothing else helps chart performance, since they’re grouped together with the original when counting plays.

I’m unsettled by the uncanny valley of qualityslop into which this falls. I am annoyed that I like this version more than its original speed, even though the vocals are clipped and the piano frantic. I don’t know if it’s better, but it holds my attention more, like a podcast on 1.25x. The description on the official-looking youtube versions reads, in part,

Fireside - Jenny Owen Youngs, John Mark Nelson, Tancred (mp3)

Every day we’re losing light / Gather round the fireside

People have been gathering round the fireside since before our species existed. Shuffling towards the warmer air, smoke-smells gathering on hair, feeling calmed by the mesmerizing flicker of the flames.

The first firesides would not have been our own; like cheetahs, chimpanzees, and “fire follower” birds, ancient hominids likely foraged freshly-cooked meat from wildfires.

Tit for Tat (Ain’t No Taking Back) - James Brown (mp3)

While listening to James Brown’s Funky Christmas earlier this week, I realized this song has been underappreciated, including by me. A Spotify search reveals zero covers of this song, and I tried with additional Christmas keywords, so I don’t think there are a ton of hidden covers being drowned out by Tate McRae remixes.

This song’s callouts to different age groups at what is presumably a family Christmas party are so fun: the baby section / teenagers / adults all at once ...  Everybody can have fun! As more of my friends start to have kids, my social life is becoming a bit more age-diverse, but the transition hasn't been entirely smooth. I want to get better at hosting kid-friendly events, and at accommodating parents at the events I host (maybe by getting better at offering collective childcare? I hope this will become easier as more friends have kids…). It feels sad to me that some of my friendships have faded because my life and theirs have too disparate a level of kid-friendliness. The masterful pandemic-era Octopus Pie comic captured this well:

Snow Flakes - The Ventures (mp3)

I rode a streetcar up a mountain today, starting in frosty fog and ending in sparkling snow. The urge to stomp a path into unmarked snowdrifts was more powerful than I expected. I ran around like a kid and got ice down my jeans and in my blundstones. This song is a somewhat calmer take on snow, but you can hear the sparkles, can’t you?

The Ventures produced one of the all-time great xmas albums, all obnoxious xylophone twinkles over surf guitar interpolations of famous carols. This tune pulls from Greensleeves, a traditional English song that was first registered as a broadside ballad in the friggin’ 1500s, and which became associated with Christmas around a century later (it was originally about a young, possibly-promiscuous woman).

My dad is the person who introduced me to The Ventures and to a love of Christmas music. He and I both religiously observe the rule that Christmas songs may only be played between December 1 and 25. I was thinking about my dad on the mountain today, because a ride up a snowy slope was what he told me about after I read him this short passage from Douglas Coupland’s Life After God:

Deck the Halls - Too Many Zooz (link)

Welcome back to our annual xmas countdown! Let’s start with a sweaty, busy, trumpet-heavy rendition of Deck the Halls by a band that got their start as subway buskers. It’s easy to imagine hearing this song as you descend into a station in December, feeling the cold flush fade from your cheeks as you fumble for your transit card, gradually becoming aware that your coat is going to be way too warm once you’ve crammed yourself onto the train.

I think Too Many Zooz are now too popular to play subway stations; in early 2014, a few months after I did my first set of xmas countdown emails, a video of them playing in Union Square station went viral. Good thing, too; they had started subway busking in part because their drummer’s apartment exploded in a gas leak and “going down and having to play every day” was (per this article) how he could pay for his move to a new place.

This song is joyful in a frantic way that reminds me of New York. I lived there from May to August of this year, because my boyfriend could do his summer internship from a midtown office, and we’d heard that NYC is one of the great cities, and it seemed we might not have another chance to live there. My days of deciding to up and thrust myself into a new place for a few months must surely be numbered, but I haven’t fully exited that phase of life.

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas - The Beths (link)

The Beths are, using a phrase my former roommate taught me this fall, jafas, which derives from the acronym Just Another Fucking Aucklander. (Around one-third of New Zealand’s population lives in the Auckland region). A colleague of mine, also from Auckland, was telling me about the “Midwinter Christmas” dinner parties he and his friends host in July, a time when the season is much more appropriate for a feast of roast ham, yorkshire pudding and candied yams. On Christmas itself, they usually have a family barbecue on the beach.

I was surprised how difficult it was for me, boreal born and bred, to put together the concepts of “Midwinter” and “July”. I googled “midwinter Christmas New Zealand”, thought “wait, no, he said it was in July”, and wrongly corrected my search to “midsummer Christmas”.

There was a bit of Twitter brouhaha in October about a Nature commentary saying that it was “necessary and inclusive” to stop using the words “summer” and “winter” when inviting researchers to events. Many people thought this was a trivial and unnecessary bit of language policing; one person I follow pushed back gently with “I’ve repeatedly seen people fail to take the frame of reference of someone in the global south. It goes beyond just using seasons. It’s a failure of perspective taking, and using unintentionally exclusive language is just a really small part of that.”

X M A S - Faye and The Scrooges (link)

This song has been described by someone I inflicted it upon as “a bit braindead”... but also so irrepressibly festive! Now, please, tell me how to spell Christmas! C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S! X-M-A-S!

Faye and The Scrooges are a somewhat informal affair. This is the only song I’m sending out this year that isn’t available on Spotify (this newsletter remains steadfastly mp3-based!). According to some decade-old sleuthing by a music blogger, the band is “a group of friends who get together and write/record a Christmas song with just enough time to give them to friends at the pub on Christmas eve”. Between 2011 and 2019, they released eight silly, excellent Christmas songs, and not another since. I don’t know why they stopped releasing songs; for all I know, they are still recording one each year, just keeping them off Soundcloud. But I rather like the idea of them doing the project for exactly as long as it was joyful, and then letting it be done.

Robin Sloan’s newsletter recently including some thoughts on finished work:

SNOWSTORM - The Raveonettes (link)

I listened to this song yesterday as my boyfriend drove me through a snowstorm from Ottawa to Toronto. It reminded of Michael Chabon’s essay “Faking It”, perhaps the one I was most affected by in Manhood For Amateurs:

Later, after we had made it safely and without incident up and down and through ice and rain and snowfall that was at times blinding, my wife told me that she initially thought I was dangerously insane when I proposed driving to Idaho Falls through a blizzard. But then she heard something in my voice that reassured her; she’d seen something in my eyes. I looked as if I knew what I was doing. And though I gripped the wheel with bloodless hands and prayed wildly to the gods of the interstate trucker whom I carefully tailed all the way to Idaho, in the backseat the kids calmly watched their videos, and my wife studied the map and gossiped with me, and none of them knew or suspected for a moment―for I never betrayed, by word or deed, my secret―that I was in way over my head. 

Earlier in the essay, he describes the broader masculine virtue of pretending to know what you’re doing:

otro año+ - Kirnbauer

This song was included on Spotify’s Navidad en México playlist, and I guess its middle verse could sort of be interpreted as being about Christmas gifting, so I’m considering it in scope for this newsletter. What comes to mind for you when you listen through the dreamy, sparse lyrics? 

Lyrics // My translation

Veo las luces cambiar en la ciudad // I see the lights change in the city
Hay robots y tengo que frenar // There are robots, I should pump the brakes
Creo que esto va a empezar // I believe this is about to start

Todos buscan algo para dar // Everyone’s looking for something to give
Que en febrero, ya no vas a usar // That, by February, is already past its use
Tragedia internacional // International tragedy

Y yo ya sé no va a volver // And I already know it won’t return
Ese lugar que un día fue // That place that was before
Sin importar voy a intentar // No matter what, I’m going to try

Es otro año más // It’s another year

It makes me think about artificial intelligence. I don’t know how much of that was that this year was a crossover in my own experience of AI.

Feliz Navidad - Los Straightjackets

Los Straightjackets are an instrumental surf guitar band who perform wearing lucha libre masks. My father recommended their Christmas Songbook to me and I really liked this take on Feliz Navidad. Thinking about felicity and luchadors got me thinking about this graph again:

I found it on the Our World In Data page on global happiness and life satisfaction, in a section on “Culture and life satisfaction”. Self-reported happiness in Latin American countries is higher than you’d expect given their GDP per capita. I forget who I saw speculating about this, but someone else on the internet wondered if this greater happiness is visible in the way that dancing is a more common pastime in LatAm than in CANZUK. 

Make It Jingle - Preservation Hall Jazz Band & Big Freedia

This song is very loosely about asking Santa for an extravagant new car for Christmas, but I think it is mostly an excuse to say vroom vroom and bounce to jingle them keys for Freedia please. It slaps as a dance song, but I’m writing here, not dancing, so I wanted to say a few things about cars.

I see more kids on the street in European cities, and I wonder if it's related to the fact that the cars are smaller and people drive more slowly. (I know the slower, smaller cars made me feel much safer on my bicycle). It pains me that children have so much less freedom to roam than previous generations.

The Season’s Upon Us - Dropkick Murphys

This song reaches its first crescendo with the lines: Some families are messed up, while others are fine, if you think yours is crazy, well, you should see mine.

I write to you from a train cruising into Toronto, on my way from the airport to my mother’s house. If I looked through her bookshelves, I might be able to track down the neon-magenta cover of a Douglas Coupland novel that she used to reference: all families are psychotic. The quote that gives the book its title, in full, is: All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it’s just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.

I don’t think that’s true, but I was talking with a friend about how my boyfriend and I have some very similar assumptions about family, in a way that surely arises from the extreme cultural similarity of our upbringings (white anglo-Canadians with parents who went to graduate school and worked overseas, and with at least one grandparent in possession of a British accent). He said, well, this is also what happens when you like your family.