When he was still in utero, my brother would kick along to the beat of reggae songs. His sense of rhythm was not inborn, but preborn. Most of us might have had such a sense; one

Here’s a relaxing blend of Christmas piano, tape hiss, and chill beats, in case you need some lofi hip hop radio to buy/wrap presents to. Akira the Don occupies a strange corner of lofi hip hop, itself already a somewhat curious youtube-gestated genre. He mostly produces in a subgenre he calls “meaningwave”, which pairs chill beats with snippets from inspiring speeches given by men like Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, Alan Watts, Noam Chomsky, Carl Sagan, and Richard Feynman. I am almost, but not quite, the target audience for a lot of that meaning-seeking. I like parts of

On this longest night of the year, it seems right to send out the title track from  

I like a nice pop song: a cheerful and repetitive beat, simple and catchy hooks, and a few clever lines if you decide to pay attention to the lyrics. This song lasts a pop-perfect three-and-a-half minutes. It samples laughter and handclaps. It’s a bit basic, maybe, but that’s kind of the point? It’s supposed to be easy to follow; you’re supposed to sing and dance along.  

This version of Sleigh Ride is kind of a mess, which I think is great. It’s a tangle of strumming and trumpet and noise, something a group of skilled friends might throw together for a kitchen party or a parade. A happy, cacophonous, and unserious mess.

According to

The

My Christmas mix is usually quite secular. It’s not because religious Christmas songs aren’t beautiful, but because I feel terribly insincere singing along to most of them. They seem to reference a kind of faith that I don’t think I’ve ever felt. “O holy night” is very much about Christ, but I felt like I had more permission to be moved by this version, given what Ben Caplan wrote about the song

I’m of two minds about this kind of calendar hoping:

The Christmas Song - King Curtis

I will not argue that this is a Christmas song. I know that, for the other hemisphere, December 25 isn't even the bleak midwinter. Still, I enjoy having a soundtrack for the emotions that winter inspires. This song expresses a certain bleak attitude towards the future that I think is encouraged by barren trees and frozen fields and grimy snowbanks the colour of bruises.

The First Noel - Bob Dylan  

Merry Christmas, Baby - Whitehorse

2000 Miles - Nancy Wallace  

O Holy Night - Andrew Bird

This Christmas - Lachlan Denton & Studio Magic In September, I bought a book of poetry called . It’s about the size of my palm, its pressed paper cover features a lovely drawing of chrysanthemums, it appeared beside the register at my favourite bookstore one evening, and it was a terrible, terrible disappointment.

Christmas Makes Me Cry - Kacey Musgraves Last week I started reading by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Zach recommended it highly, with the caveat that it caused a weeks-long emotional crisis for everyone they knew who read it. (It’s fine, I’ve been doing an emotional crisis for .) Professor Hochschild begins the book with an anecdote from about a child labourer in an English wallpaper factory, highlighting how Marx is concerned not only with the deplorable conditions in which the child works, but with how he has been fashioned into an “instrument of labour”, a fungible accessory to a mechanized manufacturing process that is indifferent to his humanity. Considering the work of a flight attendant, whose product is not a physical item but a manufactured state of mind, Hochschild writes:

Main Title from Home Alone (Somewhere In My Memory) - Lindsey Stirling I have very fond memories of , though I wasn't allowed to watch much TV as a kid. For most of the week, the TV and VHS player stayed down in our basement, a place that I was rarely intrepid enough to explore. My grandparents were the only reason I could ever keep up in games of TV Tag.

Sometimes this song is a celebration. Not this version. Here it’s just raw, hopeless longing.

I just want you for my own, more than you could ever know,
Make my wish come true: all I want for Christmas is you

At the end of the monochromatic music video, you can see a tear catch the light as it’s wending down Ingrid Michaelson’s cheek. I never used to cry like that.

People cry in very different ways and want very different kinds of comforting when they do. Zach and I described this as “crying preferences”.

Zach usually preferred to be left alone to cry. They didn’t appreciate generic phatic supportiveness, and they didn’t trust most people to come up with any solutions that they hadn’t already thought of. If people see you crying, they feel like they have to help, and so Zach would have to push down their feelings and act helped until the comforter would go away and they could start making progress on thinking through the problem on their own.

They cried quite a lot in front of me.

Sometimes it was my fault. Sometimes I’d come up with solutions that they hadn’t already thought of. There’s a pretty wide solution space when you talk to someone every day. I’m happy I often cleared their bar of “better than weeping alone my room”. I considered buying them a Frequent Crier Program patch:

In the first, my eyes swim and my nose runs copiously. My preference is for people to acknowledge that I’m crying, but change nothing else about how we interact. (Except, perhaps, to hand me a handkerchief.)

In the second, I curl up on the nearest horizontal surface, non-verbal and sobbing. I appreciate someone being in the same room as me, indicating by their presence that they’re not appalled by my lack of composure. (Ideally reading a book or something so I don't feel like I'm inconveniencing them.)

Since Zach died, I mostly cry in a third way. My vision stays mostly clear. My face remains cool. But I figure tears must have been collecting in my eyes, because I feel them slipping down my cheek. I thought people only cried like that in movies, those neat little glinting lines down their faces.

(Maybe all my usual mess is just a result of counterproductive efforts to stay composed. I don’t fight the urge to cry about Zach.)

I don’t know what my crying preferences are for this new mode. There’s an impassable gulf between what I want and what I can have, and I don’t want to pretend it’s otherwise.

I just want you here tonight, holding on to me so tight.
What more can I do?
All I want for Christmas is you.

I’ve never heard a more serious version of Jingle Bells. At the end of , Ella Fitzgerald shouts “” and the vocals cut off sharply enough that I wonder if she started laughing. Bing Crosby sings the verses quite straightforwardly, but then the Andrews Sisters start and otherwise seem to be goofing around.

What Child Is This - PIQSIQ

From what I've read, Inuit throat singing isn't exactly a musical tradition. Traditionally, it's more of a rap (well, beatboxing) battle.

Two women stand face to face, close enough to hold each other's arms, and pass a rhythm back and forth, each filling the spaces where the other breathes. The loser is the one who breaks down laughing or misses a beat. The oral history doesn't recount when the tradition started, but it does say that the women would sing to entertain themselves and their children while the men were away on long hunts.

The Canadian Encyclopedia, in its page on Inuit Vocal Games, mentions, once, that:

Christian missionaries banned Inuit vocal games because they were thought to perpetuate non-Christian, non-white cultural practices.

This might have something to do with the gaps in the oral history.

PIQSIQ give voice to a lot of complicated feelings about this album, which is called Quviasugvik: In Search of Harmony. In an interview, they say that “Quviasugvik”, the Inuktitut word for Christmas time, is more directly translated as “happy time”. Which, of course, it isn’t for many people. From their description of this album:

What Child Is This is a chilling arrangement inspired by the sisters’ painful longing to comfort the children who were stolen away to experience their first Christmas in Residential Schools across the Arctic.

The ban on throat singing was lifted sometime in the early 1980s. Many artists and players of vocal games have been working to revive it since. This year, two teenage throat singers (that is, two people born in this millennium) created and performed in a short that appeared at the Sundance Film Festival. Earlier in 2019, a group of Inuit artists boycotted Canada’s aboriginal music awards over the nomination of a Cree musician who had used throat singing on her album. The group called themselves the Arnaqquasaaq Collective, which they explained in a Facebook post:

There is a little island outside of Iqaluit named Arnaqquasaaq. Inuit women and children used to have to stay there while Inuit men went to help the American army build the runway during the Cold War. The men would row between Arnaqquasaaq and shore every day.

They shared a photograph of the island, as well:

There's a tension between the sounds in this song. Delicate, almost choral harmonies set against the guttural rasping rhythm of air catching in throats. It's harsh and beautiful and uncomfortable, in a way that expresses something true. Quoting the artists’ description again:

[The album] is the PIQSIQ sisters’ attempt to stitch together these contrasting experiences and create harmony out of difficulty and struggle. The entirely lyric-less album highlights the haunting melodies of their most beloved carols, allowing them to be explored and enjoyed apart from the cutting Christian contexts that tear at their unabiding souls.

Yours in seasonal tension,
- Tessa

The River (Never Freezes Anymore) - The Burning Hell

You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch - Lindsey Stirling feat. Sabrina Carpenter