Another Trip Around the World of the Music of Christmas
More reflections on the sounds of the season
This is, I think, the third time I have written an essay that tries to explain why I enjoy the music of Christmas as much as I do that also shares various recordings that I like and continues to flesh out the idea that the sounds of the season form a potent kind of folk music. These pieces are fun to put together and I hope you’ll like this year’s edition. I hope even more that you’ll share with me what are some of your favourite Christmas records.
The year here is almost done. There will be one more essay—it’s coming December 30 and will be a look back at 2025 in terms of the music I’ve enjoyed most as well as my work here.
Until then, I wish you all a wonderful holiday season where peace, love and joy will be found all around you.
Another Trip Around the World of the Music of Christmas
By: Robert C. Gilbert
From 1963 to 1969, members of the Beatles’ Fan Club would receive a seven-inch flexi disc—that’s really thin vinyl—containing a holiday message from the group. The first three messages were increasingly anarchic recordings taped at Abbey Road Studios. The following two were extended comedy skits and the final two were stitched together from separate contributions by the Fab Four.
They have only been available commercially as a collection once when, in 2017, they were released in a boxed set of seven-inches—fairly thick vinyl, this time—with replicas of the covers for each message. The cost wasn’t too hefty at just over $125 Canadian but still, shelling out that amount for about 45 minutes of talk, mostly zany, with some music, often even zanier, can only be chalked up to dedicated fandom.
Amidst the mayhem, a song occasionally emerges. Parodies of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ and ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’ Paul McCartney offers ideas that could have turned into songs for both the ’68 and ’69 messages. What could plausibly be conceived as a fleshed-out ditty starts the ’66 message and for the following year’s missive, a song is weaved through the Goon-like and Monty-Python-to-be sketches. It’s called ‘Christmas Time (Is Here Again).’ The lyrics—if you can even call them that—are rudimentary. A full-length version was released as the flip side of the single for ‘Free As a Bird’ in 1995.
Of the seven Beatles’ Fan Club records, the ’67 edition is my favourite. It’s not only because it is the funniest of them or because there are cameos by George Martin as well as Victor Spinetti, so memorable as the aggrieved TV director in A Hard Day’s Night. It’s mostly because there is an actual Beatles Christmas song on it.
That brings a lot of comfort and joy to me. It may seem a little silly to admit such a thing, to take happiness from the fact that one has the option to listen to a favourite artist at this time of the year and hear a selection or an album or albums of music of the season, but it’s a feeling I have often felt, especially because of how I approach listening to and enjoying the music of Christmas each year.
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There’s a point—usually around mid-November—where my indulgence become exclusive to any other type of music. The reason is not simply because I love the many ways that musicians seek to express the feelings, experiences and other assorted thoughts of Yuletide in melody and (mostly) lyrics. It’s that the opportunity to hear it all is brief. Everything else can wait.
In the harangue that always attends what can feel like an onslaught of recordings that can be aggressively cheerful, painfully banal or sugary enough to give one cavities, there is much pleasure the music lover can take in how the sounds of the season are presented and heard.
Peoples’ ears grow wider. The strictness of narrowcasting gives way to something more elastic. Each season, the durability and adaptability of the canon of the seasonal repertoire is demonstrated once more. And, perhaps most interestingly, Christmas music—not a genre of course but a collection of music marked by a depth and breadth of expression on one subject only unmatched by romantic love—shines anew as a folk music of awesome strength.
All this then suggests to me evidence of music as one of this world’s most ennobling and enriching forces. Taking this perspective then makes the inevitability of Brenda Lee’s recording of ‘Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree’ wracking up millions upon millions of plays proof that a piece of music can be an always flowing current of riches. The record also gives a chance to hear the cream of the Nashville A-Team, including Hank Garland, Buddy Harman, Boots Randolph and Millie Kirkham. It’s a great bonus.
There’s a way to attack this music to mine greater meaning from it. Take ‘It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,’ one of two immortal seasonal recordings by Andy Williams. It is a prime example of holiday music with pep: a big band, a choir, a celeste, all an affirmation of the pedestal upon which Christmas is perched. The song was written by Kay Thompson and the arrangement here is by Johnny Mandel. The cheer is overwhelming but not, I would argue, in the force in which it is expressed but how, in hearing it and buying wholeheartedly into its sentiment, it can cause the spirit to soar. And yet, there’s something else working here. It is felt when Williams, a singer whose ability to communicate directly is underappreciated, sings, “there’ll be scary ghost stories / and tales of the glory / of Christmases long ago.” Those lines deepen the meaning, layering in both nostalgia as well as the fact that those happy moments of bygone days include loved ones who are no longer here.
That bittersweet feeling anchors Paul Anka’s recording of the number in 2011. It’s also sentimental but from another angle. He turns it into a ballad, taking his time over each word, each syllable, touching on another feeling that can be felt—at least by me—at this time of the year: how wonderful it is to experience another Christmastime. A gooey feeling perhaps but one that feels honest and when that thought takes over, a song is never far behind. One like ‘Step Into Christmas.’
Written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, and recorded by John in 1973, the year of ‘Candle in the Wind,’ ‘Bennie and the Jets’ and ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,’ its primary virtue is its relentless pulse that digs deeper and pushes harder over its four-and-a-half minutes, plateauing during the ecstatic coda. I must have heard it hundreds and hundreds of times, even a thousand, by now—it’s another seasonal record that’s everywhere. I don’t get tired of it though, especially as it illustrates the rarefied orbit that John and Taupin were circling at the time.
Something else stands out about ‘Step Into Christmas’ and I have to thank a cover of the song that was part of the soundtrack for the picture, Oh. What. Fun. It’s by Uwade, a singer I hadn’t heard of before. She strips down the arrangement but leaves in all the hooks and breaks and by doing so, reveals what ‘Step Into Christmas’ is—a homage to Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. Give a listen to their ‘Child of Winter’ from a year later and the connection is clear.
Discovering something new in a piece of music is always exciting. Here’s another Yuletide example and it’s Beach Boys related too.
Carnie and Wendy Wilson’s ‘Hey Santa!’ is admittedly an example of the excesses that music about Christmas can sometimes have but there is a delight to savour here. It happens during the coda. As the Wilson sisters repeat “with my baby tonight / sleigh ride / sleigh ride / sleigh ride,” a male voice answers with “it’s Christmas time.” It’s a familiar one though it took a long time for me to realize who it was. But then it came to me and the memories of ‘Darlin’,’ ‘Wild Honey’ and ‘It’s About Time’ flooded back. It’s Carl Wilson and that it’s he who is answering his nieces gives ‘Hey Santa!’ a far different meaning than the one at its surface level. It’s really about family.
Music and family at Christmas can mean many things. The albums a brood traditionally play while trimming the tree. The songs that comment on the family dynamic during the holidays, whether rosy (Jamie Cullen’s ‘Beautiful, Altogether’), hardscrabble (Merle Haggard’s ‘If We Make It Through December’) or of deep longing for it (‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’) or anticipation of soon being enveloped in it (Chris Rea’s ‘Driving Home for Christmas’).
There’s also musical families with the Mills Brothers’ smooth, easy harmonies gliding through ‘Jingle Bells,’ the Everly Brothers’ earnestly, if a little uneasily, taking on ‘Bring a Torch, Jeannette, Isabella’ and everyone in the Jackson 5 joining in on ‘Up on the Housetop.’
“Grandmas, grandpas, fathers, mothers / friends I’ve loved dear,” Neil Diamond once sang, “sisters, brothers, sons and daughters / I once played with / aunts and uncles I once stayed with.” These words are the centrepiece of ‘Christmas Prayers,’ which he wrote for his fourth Yuletide-themed album, Acoustic Christmas, released in 2016 and most certainly his last LP. The album is pure—no amplification. The sound of friends gathered around a family room to play the well-worn hymns as well as a few other of the sacred songs of December. Acoustic Christmas employs a lot of space. Hear the pause after Diamond asks, “do you hear what I hear?” on the namesake song or how a guitar drops in, strummed with the drive as only Diamond can, before the second verse of ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.’
If we’re lucky, life gets narrower as December 25 nears. If we’re even luckier, it gets slower. Each day becomes one to savour. Anticipation is in the air. A time to, as the Irving Berlin standards goes, to “count your blessings instead of sheep” in the build-up to, as a different kind of standard goes, “almost day.”
Bruce Cockburn’s Christmas, which came out in 1993, captures these feelings well. A thorough excavation of the many ways the story of the Nativity has been captured in song, Christmas is uncompromising. Cockburn takes his time. ‘It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,’ maybe the most lovely of the well-known hymns of the season, clocks in just shy of seven minutes. He offers ‘The Huron Carol’ and ‘Riu, Riu, Chiu’ and interprets ‘Oh Little Town of Bethlehem’ as Bob Dylan might have if he had recorded it in 1963 (when Dylan tackled it himself, 46 years later, he did it like Frank Sinatra did in the forties).
To me, the album’s most stirring highlight is ‘I Saw Three Ships.’ It opens with what sounds like a pipe organ. An acoustic guitar then plays a rolling figure that sounds like the rushing in and out of the tide. An electric guitar offers an occasional accent, heightening the recording’s winter feel while also sounding like the pell of a bell proclaiming the Good News that has occasioned the arrival of the ships. It may well be the finest recording of the carol which dates back to the 17th century. I first heard Cockburn’s version on the radio the year it was released.
Indeed, each year brings new such favourites whether just out or lingering around for years waiting to be discovered. For the former, there’s the indie feel of the Oh. What. Fun. soundtrack which I mentioned earlier. In addition to Uwade’s cover of ‘Step Into Christmas,’ Andy Shauf and Madi Diaz resurrect Dennis Linde’s ‘Christmas Eve Will Kill You,’ best-known in the version recorded by the Everlys in 1971 and Sharon Von Etten has a gauzy take on the Pretenders’ ‘2000 Miles.’ This season also offers two stripped-down versions of Kenny Loggins’ beautiful ‘Celebrate Me Home’ by Lizzy McAlpine and Valerie Broussard.
Vocal group Pentatonix can always be depended upon to release something that is uplifting and fully in synch with the idea that the music of Christmas should be fun. To that end, ‘Christmas in the City, a celebration of how the holidays feel particularly vibrant in the urban jungle and ‘Bah Humbug,’ a retelling in song of Charles Dickins’ A Christmas Carol, have both been sources of delight.
Beyond what has come out this year, I’ve been enjoying the uplift of violinist Lindsey Stirling’s seasonal efforts. Livingston Taylor’s ‘My Perfect Christmas Day,’ from 2003, has a soulful message about how the best gifts are the ones that aren’t tangible and Joe Tex’s choral ‘I’ll Make Everyday Christmas (For My Woman),’ from 1967, has never been too far from my ears.
For the one recording new to me that has reached me most this year, I need to reach back to when I was young. That was, among other things, when I discovered the Beatles and first heard, through a radio documentary, their fan-club Christmas discs. It was also when, though I didn’t realize it at the time, that it would be inevitable I would become a jazz fan. That seed was planted through my grandparent’s small collection of Glenn Miller albums; the rigid swing of ‘American Patrol,’ ‘In the Mood’ and ‘Tuxedo Junction’ similar enough to the rhythm of early rock ‘n’ roll to spark a curiosity I would begin to fully investigate in my teens.
There was also ‘(I Got a Gal in) Kalamazoo’ with tenor saxophonist Tex Beneke taking the lead vocal and joined by Marion Hutton and the Modernaires. The Miller big band continued for a long time after the bandleader’s death in 1944. Beneke was one of the Miller alumni who kept the sound alive partnering with band singers Ray Eberle, Paula Kelly and the Modernaires, and releasing a series of albums. In 1965, they brought out Christmas Serenade in the Glenn Miller Style for Columbia.
Included on it was ‘We Wish You the Merriest,’ written and first recorded by Les Brown in 1961. In 1964, Sinatra and Bing Crosby recorded it in grand style with Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians, and Nelson Riddle wrangling all the forces into a rendition that is mammoth in scope. Things are narrower in the version Beneke and crew got on tape a year later but the bonhomie is ever greater.
About 80 seconds in, there’s an interlude with Kelly and the Modernaires doing a tongue-twister variation on the refrain that, this year at the very least, encapsulates the season at its best. Excitement tinged with knowing that it will be fleeting. But during that moment in the recording, nothing but joy matters. As the song goes, “may your tree be full of happiness / happiness and friendliness for all.” That is my hope for us all this holiday season and in the New Year to come.
My very best of the season to you all.