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:

Someday at Christmas - Lizzo

Lizzo said that she chose to cover this song “not just because it’s a classic, but because it’s a reminder to us that almost 60 years later, we are still fighting for peace, compassion, and equality”. Sometimes 1960s lyrics calling for peace and love feel a bit dated to me, a wish that seems too simple to overlay onto modern geopolitics. But I ought not to deride the wish; I write to you from Paris, where it snowed last night and we are having the opposite of a warm December, and war has people worried that it will get very dark and cold indeed.

Friends in North America have asked me about what the European energy crisis is like; I don’t know to what extent we’re having one, at least in France? People are definitely talking about it, but when I checked the electricity map just now, France was only using gas for 12% of its energy (62% was nuclear). Macron gave a typically testy interview last week where he rebukes public electricity companies, telling them to (pardon my translation):

Do their jobs and provide electricity… not start making people afraid with absurd scenarios like we’ve heard over the past few hours. Stop à tout ça ! We are a big country, with an excellent energy model, and we’ll hold on through the winter despite the war. And so I ask everyone to do their jobs.

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - Takénobu

I love swift little layers of cello like this; there’s something about the resonance of a bow drawn under gentle sudden notes that gets me immediately bought into an arrangement. This is a new arrangement of quite an old carol. On archive.org you can, delightfully, read a cranky broadside from 1824 about how “in London, excepting some croaking ballad-singer bawling out ‘God rest you, merry gentlemen,’ or a like doggrel, nothing in the shape of Carols is heard”.

Given its age, it’s perhaps not surprising that the lyrics are quite religious. I notice my atheist’s attention settling more on tidings of comfort and joy than satan’s power and might. There are some aspects of faith that I find appealing; when I first read the opening line of Julian Barnes’s Nothing to be Frightened Of in a newspaper, I immediately cut it out for a collage: I don’t believe in god, but I miss Him. It seems rather nice to believe in cosmic justice, and an omniscient power enforcing it.

Every Year So Different - Cornershop & TRWBADOR

As usual, a relaxed song for Christmas day. This one reminds me of why I love holiday traditions so much: 

It’s the same every year, but every year’s so different

World of Love - Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings

If I had one wish for Christmas this year
There'd be no more sorrow, there'd be no pain or tears,
If it was up to me, darling, I would build you a world of love

If you could rebuild the world, would there be no more sorrow? I think there is far too much pain in the world, but wouldn’t it be a little dull if there were no pain or tears whatsoever?

One of my favourite blogs of 2021 recently put out a post on Why Describing Utopia Goes Badly. The author’s theory is that utopias sound dull, homogeneous and alien. Dull because there isn’t as much room for overcoming challenges and conflict. Homogeneous because many utopias apply a specific lifestyle to everyone in society. Alien because:

Maybe Next Year - Jenny Owen Youngs

A song about missing someone at Christmas. The opening piano chords made me think this would be a real downer, but the mood is more one of wistful melancholy:

easy to let you go most of the time
the ache in my chest has been slipping my mind
see on the screen it’s a wonderful life

THANK YOU MARIAH - Kaleena Zanders

You might expect me to get excited when grocery stores start playing Christmas music over their tinny speakers, but though I am, obviously, something of a Christmas music enthusiast, I find a lot of Christmas music to be cloying and annoying. Many seasonal songs are best avoided if possible.

This absolute bop of a Christmas track is a comedic celebration of being annoyed at inescapable Christmas songs:

Skating on the River - Lily Frost

Do you listen to songs on repeat? Not just once or twice, but for hours? I don’t do this very often, but I did a marathon of Skating on the River in December… 2006, I think? I was nursing a massive crush on a friend and “skating on the river, your hand in mine” seeked a very romantic prospect. It’s possible I did actually hold hands with this person while skating along a scenic path through the woods. You’d think I’d remember one way or another, but she was a much better skater than me (she played hockey, this newsletter is CanCon) and any hand-holding would have been easy to interpret as friendly stabilization rather than flirting.

This is a challenge I’ve often encountered when trying to flirt with girls: how do I indicate romantic interest, short of directly propositioning someone? Friends can cuddle, hold hands, and tell each other they’re beautiful. Some friends even call each other girlfriends. You would think kissing would be unambiguous, but I present as counter-evidence a conversation with one of my first year roommates:

Jingle Bell Rock (Spanish version) - Flor de Toloache

I find most versions of Jingle Bell Rock pretty dull. Sure, the tune gets lodged in my head, but the lyrics are so contentless that it ends up sounding way too much like this unhinged parody. 

The Flor de Toloache version gets points for (code)-switching up the lyrics, which means you get to hear silly  intersentential switching between Spanish and English, like Giddy-up jingle horse, te toca trotar, and learn the extremely delightful verb cascabelear. I don’t think I caught examples of other types of code-switching in the lyrics, but correct me if I’m wrong!

Glittery - Kacey Musgraves (feat. Troye Sivan)

I like how this song describes positive but somewhat confusing romantic feelings. Every single kiss is like a gift to me but also you shake me up and turn me upside down just like a snow globe.

I’ve never felt that skilled at expressing my romantic feelings. I’m often caught tangle-tongued when partners sincerely say sweet things to me. “Thanks, yes, I… also think you are great” feels pretty weak.

Holiday - She & Him

I haven’t been an engineer for more than a year. Instead, I’m doing stuff that I believe is important in theory (encouraging young synthetic biologists to reflect on responsible science) but that, hour-to-hour, involves a lot of sending emails and espousing opinions I feel underqualified to defend.

I volunteered for this nonprofit before starting my job, and I was a really good volunteer! I used to wonder why I seemed to show more agency and dedication in my volunteer gigs than at my engineering job… Was I just kind of a bad employee? A bad engineer? More passionate about responsibility than robots? Now that I’m doing this work full-time, I think it’s more that I wasn’t previously paying The Costs of Reliability: