“I don’t know what to say except it’s Christmas and we’re all in misery.”
So speaks Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo), Clark Griswold’s long-suffering wife in the second-best Christmas movie ever made, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
I actually love the holidays, but one of the things that can make the season dark is Christmas music, which can be just awful. On the other hand, there’s a lot of really excellent seasonal stuff out there, and if a guy sits in his living room by just the light of the Christmas tree sipping a nice Manhattan (one part brandy, one part bourbon, one part sweet vermouth, a dash of orange bitters and two cherries on a green plastic sword stick) and nibbling on some sharp cheddar (Hook’s is best), and he listens to his favorite selection of holiday tunes, he may find that he doesn’t have to be so miserable after all.
Between CDs, digital and even some old vinyl, I have hundreds of Christmas songs in my collection. This includes 14 versions of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” I have the original, which was recorded by, that’s right, Judy Garland for the movie Meet Me in St. Louis, which isn’t worth watching except for the song. I also have two versions by Frank Sinatra, who would have been 100 years old this December had he lived to be George Burns.
The end of the year is a great time for list making — biggest news stories of the year, celebrities who passed away, most popular new aps, top 10 words and expressions that should be retired (I vote for “in that space”), etc.
So in the spirit of pointless list making, here are my five favorite holiday tunes:
5. Robert Earl Keen’s “Merry Christmas from the Family”
Keen’s laconic song about a typical dysfunctional family Christmas is a lot closer to reality than most of us would like to get. It’s clever, lightly cynical and insightful but maybe too close for comfort for a lot of us. Still, it’s worth a listen at least once a year. It might make you laugh, or it might make you remember stuff you need to pick up at the Kwik Trip.
4. Barenaked Ladies’ “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”
With Sarah McLachlan, the boys from Ontario do a snappy riff on the classic tune. And now that the Canadians have elected a liberal government and are actually welcoming Syrian refugees, there’s all the more reason to enjoy imports form north of the border.
3. James Taylor’s “Auld Lang Syne”
Taylor’s rendition of the Robert Burns poem set to a Scottish folk song is touching and sad without crossing over into being schmaltzy or morose. And this year the seas between us sure have roared and swelled.
2. John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things”
Released in 1961, this iconic jazz interpretation of the tune from the Sound of Music couldn’t get any further from Julie Andrews. But it was actually a mainstream hit that year. It’s hard to imagine anything this good making it to the heavy rotation lists today. The Mad Men era may have been terrible for the treatment of women and retrograde in a whole lot of other ways, but hey, the music was pretty good. A guy can sit in his dimly lit room with his cocktail listening to that song and he can almost smell the cigarette smoke and hear the glasses tinkle in the background.
1. Mel Torme’s “Good King Wenceslas”
You’ve gotta love the “Velvet Fog,” who enjoyed a brief hipster revival with appearances on Seinfeld. (Seinfeld. Jerry Seinfeld. He had a popular show when your parents were your age. Oh, never mind.) His swingin’, scattin’ version of the classic song is my favorite holiday tune in part for its message and in part for Torme’s jazzy treatment. When Torme sings, “Therefore Christian men be sure, wealth or rank possessing, he who now shall bless the poor shall yourselves find blessing,” you can be reminded that Christianity has a better side than the hating xenophobia on display by the self-described Christians running in the Republican presidential primary.
And, along those lines, my candidate for the worst Christmas song ever? Well, there’s way too much competition in this category. And every year there’s a favorite. For me this year it’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” A person can’t escape a mall without hearing it four times. All I want from Christmas is to never hear “All I Want for Christmas Is You” ever again. My first nightmarish recollection of hearing the song was in the movie Love, Actually, which I actually loved the first time I saw it. The last time I saw it I felt about it the way I feel about The Big Chill. What was I thinking?
By the way (and I won’t tolerate any disagreement on this point), the best Christmas movie ever is White Christmas with Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye and Rosemary Clooney. It’s earnest in its post-war optimism and cheerful sentimentality, and the music and dancing are really good. Snow! Snow!! Snow!!!
Anyway, back to the task at hand, which is naming what is in my view the worst Christmas song ever. My candidate is “Christmastime All Over the World,” which was a minor hit for Sammy Davis around 1970.
Trigger warning for Donald Trump, who will find this politically correct: This song displays a naïve cultural sensitivity by assuming that if children just learn to wish each other “Merry Christmas” in their native languages, the world will be a better place. Never mind that a lot of those kids live in places where the dominant religion is Buddhism or Islam or Judaism, or maybe their family isn’t religious at all. All we know for sure is that it will be December 25th all over the world, well, except for places where it will be the 26th already.
The underlying message of the song, though, is worth appreciating. It would be great if we took time out to remind ourselves of what we have in common. It’s not Christianity, but it should be a common sense of human decency and respect for different points of view. That’s something King Wenceslas would understand.
