Holiday - Monogem

I enjoy and envy this song’s casually bilingual lyrics. The chorus:

Doesn’t matter what you celebrate y no importa que holiday
Ahora disfrutemos, ahora on a holiday

My mum tells me about how my Armenian grandmother, who spoke five languages before coming to Canada (none of them English), would chat with her multilingual friends, flitting between English, Italian, Armenian, French, and more, depending on which best suited the sentiment they were trying to express. I wish my friends and I were similarly fluid-fluent.

Christmas Calling (Jolly Jones) - Norah Jones

My dad told me that Christmas was one of the only times each year that he’d speak to his grandmother. The family would make a call to England and then wait. This was the era of switchboards, not fibre optics, and there were many more calls trying to reach across the Atlantic Ocean than could be transmitted at one time. Their Christmas call didn’t always get through.

Family calls are still a part of my Christmas traditions. I’m grateful for broadband and video codecs and everything else that lets me watch people across the ocean break into a smile in nearly real time. A video chat on December 25 has been, during some years, the only time I’ve talked to a certain uncle or aunt. This makes me want to have more occasions to muster as excuses to call people. Birthdays, of course, but maybe the equinoxes should also become phone-call holidays for me?

(To be clear, this song is not entirely about phone calls, but the second verse includes I could call you on the phone, instead of feeling all alone this Christmas, which is my second favourite part of the song after the line I wanna be a Jolly Jones, instead of feeling all alone. What a hilarious way to refer to your kinda-sad self! I love it.)

All I Want for Christmas Is You - Kishi Bashi (feat. Finom)

There are a lot of Christmas love songs that emphasize how much they don’t care about the presents… which is very far off from my experience of Christmas as a child. Santa Claus won’t make me happy with a toy on Christmas Day? Absolutely not true when I was five. I would lie in bed at my grandparents’ house, clenched with excitement, hoping I’d hear Santa arriving with my presents.

Why was this? I reflected a bit on childish impatience and acquisitiveness, but spent more time thinking about how children have so little control over whether they get the things they want. My parents were very interested in giving their children autonomy, and I think I had a relatively generous amount of it, but I still mostly didn’t decide what I ate, or where I went, or what stuff I owned.

I don’t have enough money to buy myself literally all the toys I want, but did buy myself toys (well, okay, one Spider-Punk action figure) and art supplies and books and new clothes this year, in greater quantities than I ever acquired new things as a child (except! at Christmas).This morning I ate some chocolate and nobody even noticed how much. I could order myself a Scott Pilgrim action figure today and no one else would need to know. For the most part, kids only get new things when an adult buys them a gift.

Patapan - Emma Wallace

This is an English version of a traditional French carol in the mode of Little Drummer Boy, a story of simple instruments brought to celebrate the baby Jesus. Wikipedia has multiple versions of the lyrics, though I think these lyrics are nicer than any of them? There are particular smooth rhymes (all the revel and the din, from without and within, with the humming violin, we shall welcome Christmas in) and all of the religious imagery has been replaced instead with secular winter scenery, circles around hearths and frosty windowpanes.

I was singing this song yesterday (... when I was supposed to send it out, oops) around my girlfriend Samira, who joined in with completely different lyrics that she’d learned in choir. “Well, seems like a folk song,” she said, when our disjointedness broke off the tune. I do like this feature of folk music; most of the singing I’ve done in my adult life is rather slapdash song circles in the mode of Rise Up Singing or the monthly San Francisco chantey sing. There are a few songs in my repertoire that I learned around campfires as a tall ship teen without ever seeing the lyrics written down, and I absolutely do not sing them the same way as people who learned them from a different songbook or oral tradition. But isn’t it wonderful the way oral tradition gives the music freedom to evolve?

Which also makes me think of this line in the song: come be merry while you play, let us make our Christmas gay. Now, the French lyrics on Wikipedia say Au son de ces instruments, je dirai Noël gaîment, but Emma Wallace released this song in 2019, and she was clearly willing to rewrite many of the lyrics, but she chose to end the song on a repeated let us make our Christmas gay, which, uh, the 2019 meaning is not the same as the 1720 meaning. See this very clear graph from a 2011 paper, “Understanding Semantic Change of Words Over Centuries”, which annotated the Topics-Over-Time associated with 5-word clusters that contained “gay”, and, well:

White Christmas - Kaskade

Kaskade is a world-famous DJ who has received multiple grammy awards, and this year he released a second album of Christmas electronica. I’ve written several times before about his approach: “The songs are electronic, they’re dance music, but they’re also solemn and precise and so unironic as to be... almost courteous?”

Thinking about how much I like this song got me thinking about a John Green video that my friend Alex sent me, titled COMMIT TO THE BIT. What does this mean? John gives several examples of what comes to mind when he thinks of stellar commitment to the bit. YouTuber Jonathan Mann releasing a Song A Day for more than 14 years. Marina Abramović and her partner meeting in the middle of the Great Wall of China, after each walking over 2000 km from opposite ends, and, he says:

I think of the Reddit user who in 2012 wrote, "Your momma so lazy" and then returned in 2021 to write, "She took 9 years to finish this joke".

A Christmas Long Ago (Jingle, Jingle) - The Echelons

This song came into my life through Doo Wop Christmas, a Rhino Records compilation CD released the year I was born. I inherited much of my taste in Christmas music from my dad, as well as my bizarrely strict personal rule not to listen to any Christmas songs before December 1. I remember listening to some of these songs recently with him, and my dad said, “I bet you don’t know too many people who listen to doo wop, do ya?” It’s true, I don’t! It’s a dated sound, one that few people are recording these days*, and one that I love. 

There are two poems about inheritance and aging and the passing-on of people and habits and things that I keep thinking of this year. When I look at the books and socks and shirts my Nana gave me before she died, one of which I’m wearing right now, I think of all the poetry she carefully piled up for in a corner of her shelf, and her bin of neatly folded clothing that was a little too nice to hand off to the charity shop before her granddaughters had a chance to try them on, and I think of the poem “I Dare You” by Doiranne Laux. I tried to find a nice bit of excerpt, but, damn it, I love the whole thing, so I’ve copied in all of it:

What Will Santa Claus Say (When He Finds Everybody Swingin’?) - Louis Prima and his New Orleans Gang

I like this song, which I’m sending today because I’m in New Orleans right now, where both Louis Prima and his musical genre were born.

Why did jazz originate here in the 1890s? Apparently it was a mixture of local African-American rhythms (such as drumming traditions developed by slaves and the call-and-response tunes of the Black Masking Indians of Mardi Gras), new dance genres that emerged from the proliferation of brass brands around the USA after the civil war, and new segregation laws that discriminated against Creoles of colour (which brought together Black and Creole musicians). 

Louis Prima grew up in Tremé, a New Orleans neighbourhood that was one of the first places in the South that free Black people could buy property. Prima got interested in jazz after listening to the sounds that spilled into the street from Tremé’s many integrated Italian- and African-American nightclubs. He started his first jazz band in 1924, when he was just 13. During the Great Depression, Prima went to New York City to work at a club called Leon and Eddie’s, which refused to hire him because the owner, upon meeting him, thought he was Black (his parents were Sicilian). He eventually found work in New York City and recorded his first songs (including this one in 1936. You might be familiar with his voice from the Disney Movie The Jungle Book; he plays King Louie! (Apparently Disney considered Louis Armstrong for the role, but thought better of casting a Black man as an ape.)

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. 

Parfait Noël - Coeur de Pirate

Welcome back to xmas countdown! We’re starting off with a song that, instrumentally, could be a gooey holiday romance, but, lyrically, offers extravagant seasonal viciousness:

Et pour Noël, je voudrais couper le fond de tes bas
Laisser l’eau geler et faire une patinoire chez toi

Which translates roughly to: "For Christmas, I’d like to cut the bottom off your stocking, then let the water freeze and make your house into a skating rink". Which leads into the chorus:

Grinch' - SwuM

Here We Come A-Caroling - Pomplamoose

This song is an adaptation of Here We Come A-Wassailing that removes some of the awkward class dynamics in the original lyrics, which originate in an English peasant tradition of door-to-door trading of well-wishes for food that apparently “could border on home invasion”. In this version we hear less “bring us out your mouldy cheese” and “while you’re sitting by the fire, pray think of us poor children” and more:

May we all remember as we go from door to door
To be a friendly neighbour
To care and offer more
Love and joy

I’m a big fan of wishing people love and joy! The only meditation practice I do with anything approaching regularity is a kind of metta, sitting and wishing love and joy to increasingly distant beings, moving out from my closest people and settling on those I struggle to cultivate sympathy for, insects or enemies, then moving back in to eventually wish the same wellness for myself. Honestly, it just feels really nice to wish others well.

New Snow - Sunturns

Sunturns are “a Norwegian super-group devoted to Christmas”. This song is their offering for 2022; it looks back upon the past few pandemic years, lonely and awful as they were, and then, hopeful and fragile, turns towards the next few. I think it’s beautiful.

I’ve been hitting these blue notes
Now there’s puke in the new snow
I’ve been feeling so down low
These past few years.

A friend said he was starting to understand the bawdy triviality of the jazz age decadence. After the first world war killed around 1% of the allied and 5% of the central powers, and then the 1918 influenza pandemic swept in to kill another 1-2% of everyone? "Oh, god, they all just wanted to forget".

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas [Auxjack Remix] - Ella Fitzgerald

There a few rules for the music that appears in the newsletter: I only send out songs that I like, I don’t repeat any songs already sent in previous years, and I don’t repeat a particular artist (e.g. Sharon Jones) or carol (e.g. Jingle Bells) in a single year.

Does this song break the rules? It’s a remix of a song that appears on Ella Wishes You A Swinging Christmas, which is the same 1960 album on which you’ll find Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!, which I shared four days ago. Do you remember the mid-aughts debates about “remix culture”? You can get a sense them reading David Byrne’s notes on the Creative Commons CD he put together for Wired Magazine in 2004:

Silver Bells - quinnie

I’ve referred to Silver Bells in a previous countdown as “sort of the classic urban Christmas song” and I stand by that characterization. I’m not quite convinced by this version’s delivery of the opening city sidewalks, busy sidewalks, sung by a musician best known for her (delightful) female-gaze-centred tiktok hit, but I love her sidewalk-shuffling rhythm and music box chimes.

I will miss Parisian street corners, not only because the buildings that define them are so casually, generously beautiful, but because the city is oriented towards the street in a way that gives it great liveliness.  Traffic is terrible, so people bring their groceries home in wheeled trolleys. With meme-worthy zeal, Anne Hidalgo is rapidly reclaiming space for cyclists and pedestrians in central Paris. But also, Parisians have lived in small apartments for generations, so people are used to seeing each other in terraces and parks and other open spaces.

Unfamiliar patterns of street life feel like a rather shallow thing to expect to miss about a place; easy to observe without speaking to anyone or going anywhere in particular. The local patterns of traffic are often one of the first things I notice in a new city. Do people jaywalk here? Will any turning cars or speeding e-scooters cut me off at the crosswalk? How do people pass each other, in these bustling streets?

Home To You (This Christmas) - Sigrid

Sigrid originally wrote this without any Christmas references, but said that “it’s about my hometown and the house I grew up in with my family. I always go back for Christmas, so it felt natural to make a Christmas version.” She’s made also made a lovely little website to accompany this version:

Home To You is a love letter to my hometown. After so much time apart from the places we love the last couple of years, I want to celebrate the places that mean home to you. Tell me where home is for you at Christmas time and have your city featured on the map.

At the time of this writing, the map allows you to click through "3104 meanings of home shared", snippets like "Åsgårdstrand: a place where i can go to gather my thougts", "Hong kong: everything" and "Enschede: my roommates".

Un Noël perdu dans Paris - Pierre Lapointe

I lived in the 18th arrondissement of Paris for most of 2022, and this song feels apropos: a Christmas lost in Paris, searching for signs of you.

In last year’s countdown, I wrote about applying for a French visa out of a sense of aimless optionality. One of the things I found difficult, in my third year of grieving the person I’d hoped to spend my life with, was that I couldn’t wholeheartedly invest in new relationships or community. “I think there will come a time when I have grown so used to that loss that I’m ready to throw myself into constructing a new life,” I wrote, “But not yet.”

And, if I wasn’t ready to construct a new life, why not explore someplace other than my hometown? Better still if it would allow me to improve my French and enjoy the comforts of a city where 94% of people live within a 5-minute walk of a boulangerie.

Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow! - Ella Fitzgerald

I write this from beside a warm wood stove, from which this cozy song ― the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful ― feels particularly relevant. I enjoy a fireplace, but with more internal conflict than I did a few years ago.

During a particularly bad forest fire season in 2020, my roommate in California bought an air quality monitor, and I was quite shocked that, on the graphs it produced, I could see that actions like “frying some dumplings” and “blowing out a candle” absolutely filled our apartment’s air with particulate matter. And, quoting The Fireplace Delusion: 

The reality of our situation is scientifically unambiguous: If you care about your family’s health and that of your neighbors, the sight of a glowing hearth should be about as comforting as the sight of a diesel engine idling in your living room.

Winter Wonderland - Goldfrapp

This version of Winter Wonderland feels colder than most arrangements, in a remote and sparkling way that sounds like a bright subzero day.

Glistening snow is indeed a beautiful sight― one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen was a lightless section of an Ontario cave, which, when I swept my headlamp into its depths, revealed itself via sudden glittering refraction to be lined with ice crystals. The flashing crystals were so sharply geometric that it was hard to believe they were made of water, but one melted when I touched it. (My disbelief was quite unscientific; geologically, ice is as much a mineral as quartz.)

I’m staying with my grandparents in Wales right now, and the wetter climate has combined with a cold snap to generate crystalline hoarfrost along their town’s branches and blades of grass.

Santa Tell Me - Campsite Dream

I love the concept of this song: if Santa has omniscient knowledge of if you’ve been bad or good, presumably he also knows whether your boyfriend’s love is real? (The Ariana Grande version is a little too smooth for my taste, but this tropical house cover is short and sweet.)

The oracular surveillance aspect of Santa Claus mythology is a little uncomfortable. I’m not sure how global this part of the story is, but it’s not terribly recent; when Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town became a hit on US radio in 1934, it already included the lyric he sees you when you’re sleeping. Newer versions tend to omit the verse more connected to the song’s Great Depression origins, which entreats people to give to their neighbours:

We’ve gotta dig deep and cover the list, gotta see that nobody is missed…
Let’s keep the home fires burning, let’s give without a pause
Let’s prove to those less fortunate that there is a Santa Claus.

Home Alone, Too - The Staves

Here’s something I love about holidays and traditions: you do nearly the same thing, year after year, and it has a way of helping you notice recent differences in yourself. Last Christmas my mum gave me Sasha Sagan’s For Small Creatures Such As We, a book I felt immediate kinship with. One quote:

Rituals are, among other things, tools that help us process change. There is so much change in this universe, so many entrances and exits, and ways to mark them… each one astonishing in its own way.

The changes that I need help processing are not always pleasant. Ritual repetition throws into relief the people who are missing from my life, most especially Zach, who remains, across my adult years thus far, the person I knew best and was best known by. This song is about wondering about the parallel life of somebody you used to know: