Christmas Music: Boost or Bane?
Before it turned into a zombie-like soundtrack to goad shopping, yuletide music used to be stirring and magical.
DECEMBER 15 WAS A BIG DAY FOR ME as a kid. That was the date when a small radio station in West Covina, California, not far from where we lived, converted their 101 Strings-inspired adult contemporary playlist to non-stop Christmas music. Seasonal tunes that played 24/7 until the stroke of midnight on December 25.
Today, that sounds like being trapped in one of Dante’s Circles of Hell, but back then (and when you are thirteen), it was novel—another December event, like escaping from school for a week, to anticipate.
In the 1970s, radio stations didn’t begin broadcasting holiday music the day after Halloween. Usually, around a week before Christmas, the classics were hauled out of storage and taken for a spin.
This particular station’s holiday playlist was a terrific blend of secular and sacred tunes. So you’d have Ella Fitzgerald scatting through Frosty the Snowman, which would segue into the Boston Camerata doing Ave Maris Stella. Again, this was decades before Christmas music had been commodified into a soundtrack for shopping.
Both of my parents in that household (my dad and my stepmom) were heavy drinkers, especially around the holidays, because my dad disliked the nuisance (it meant spending money). And my stepmom, a sort of ‘fallen’ Catholic, liked to throw ’em back to forget about having abandoned Jesus.
As the oldest sibling (and most pragmatic human) in the crib, I had to manage everything “Christmas.” I pestered my dad to purchase a tree, goaded my brothers to help decorate it, and forbade our two Dobermans from entering the living room to gnaw on the garland. Have you ever seen tinsel entwined in a dog turd? I have.
Anyway, that station that played Christmas music non-stop kept me on point. Aside from the usual excitement kids have around the holiday, I was also a budding disc jockey (twenty years later, I would actually man the mixing console at Hawai’i’s biggest homo disco in Honolulu)—so a cycle of songs that returned annually, still sounding fresh, charmed me.
The disc jockeys at the West Covina station also knew how to blend tracks and genres effortlessly, from the schmaltz to the sacrosanct.
This honed my ears for good Christmas songs. Steering me away from pop stars who were recording holiday music to fulfill requirements in their contracts.
Eventually, those mercenary efforts mutated into an epidemic—right around Mariah Carey’s first holiday LP in the mid-90s. I’ve nothing against her record, but it opened the floodgates on all of the glissando-manic, glory note-chasing kitsch that’s ubiquitous today.
Over the years, and before I sold all of my vinyl records and CDs and migrated to Spotify, I would post periodic Christmas mixes on my old Mixcloud account.
And lucky you, those mixes are still there.
You’ll have to rummage through several non-holiday mixes, but you’ll find ‘em all preserved for posterity.
For my mom, the year before she died, I compiled a Christmas playlist on Spotify that’s fairly easygoing, with many of her favorite songs. Check it out. Set it to shuffle randomly for optimal playback.
My most popular playlist is the one I created a decade ago for the solstice. It includes Gregorian chants, medieval hymns, orchestral flourishes, and instrumental carols. You can stream it here.
Enjoy!
Love,
Opening photograph: Christmas card image from photographer Martin Parr’s vintage collection published in From Our House to Your House.
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A Sacred Solstice Compendium. It was in your December 2015 newsletter. It was a balm before the first trumpshitnado.