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

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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

Hazy Shade of Winter - The Bangles

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.

Do I want to be easier to please? It’s a little bitter, sure, but also observant, energetic, imperative. Becoming a new creature whether I like it or not, - Tessa

Jolly Old King Wenceslas - John Doan
I don't know if I should blame Charles Dickens or British colonialism or what, but many Christmas carols that sound "traditional" to me originated in Victorian times. This song just sounds so proper, the way John Doan has arranged it for toy pianos, parlour guitars, and other period instruments. Everything "traditional" was once invented, of course, and much of it was viciously controversial. Critics this song. Wikipedia lifts the following quote from the 1928 Oxford Book of Carols:

The First Noel - Bob Dylan  

Merry Christmas, Baby - Whitehorse

If I ever raise children, I wonder how much I’ll lie to them. I know my mother was reluctant to tell us the standard Christmas lie, but “the thing is,” she said, when I asked her about it this morning, “the whole culture is set up to sabotage my efforts.”

2000 Miles - Nancy Wallace  

O Holy Night - Andrew Bird

Cherishing unsophisticated things, - Tessa *Tangent: I learned that was originally credited just to “Vince Guaraldi”, since he kept abysmal records of his session players. Rude, Vince. Anyway, later versions have been credited to “Vince Guaraldi Trio”. While all of the songs were performed by three musicians, there isn’t any single consensus Trio; you’re hearing at least two different drummers and bassists on the album. (It is still a point of contention as to whether more than five people contributed to the tracks because, again, abysmal records.) Anyway, thank you for subscribing to music facts! Appreciate your session musicians!

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:

Commercial demand for our emotional labour alienate us from our sincere emotional responses. This is worrying; Professor Hochschild thinks our sincere emotions serve an important in helping us perceive the world. (This idea is such a core part of the modern CBT/DBT canon that I was surprised by how much it apparently needed to be defended circa 1983.) She writes that “people turn to feelings in order to locate themselves or at least to see what their own reactions are to a given event”. Alienation interferes with the signal. How, you might ask, does this relate to a country song about crying at Christmas? Well, a bit loosely, to be honest. But: Hochschild doesn’t confine her analysis to the commercial management of feeling. She discusses how we manage even private feelings according to rules such as “I shouldn’t feel so angry at her” or, perhaps, “I should feel happy at Christmas”. She doesn’t think this is a new phenomenon, or even necessarily a problem, but similar warnings about alienation apply. All this to say: maybe try to observe your feelings before they're subsumed under a seasonally-appropriate smile? Broken parts just wrapped in pretty paper, - Tessa  

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.

All I Want For Christmas Is You - Ingrid Michaelson (feat. Leslie Odom Jr.)

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:

My own (less-frequent) crying used to fall into two modes.

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.

Longing is one facet of love,
- Tessa

Jingle Bells - Kaskade (feat. Soran)

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.