Holidays Are Comin'...

As soon as you hear them, you officially consider Christmas to be up and started.

Christmas is the only time of year remotely cool enough to have an entire genre dedicated it. I mean, Bing Crosby wouldn’t have touched I’m Dreaming of A Brown Autumn with a ten-foot clown pole, and I’m sure Roy Wood and Wizard would’ve guffawed at the notion of I Wish It Could Be The Vernal Equinox Every Day. Yup, Christmas songs have a great habit of helping build excitement and expectation and generally warming the cockles, some more so than others mind…

Being an old-school crooner at heart, my particular favourite festive song is Dean Martin’s Let it Snow. It’s Christmas at its swingin’ best, and sure to get you in the mood for delightful fires, poppin’ corn and inclement weather conditions outside. Mind you, the sumptuously voiced Nat King Cole’s Christmas Song is a close second.

Staying in the old-school box, Bing Crosby’s White Christmas has to stand as one of the all-time standard bearers. It was recorded for the film High Society (a musical version of the far-superior Philadelphia Story) starring Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly, and became an instant classic, selling like the proverbial hotcakes. To this day, it’s the highest selling record that wasn’t bought when prompted by the death of royalty.

Staying with Bing, for decades he was ‘the man’ when it came to Christmas, with his famous “Christmas Specials” filmed at his house with all the family, became an American national treasure. In fact, the last record he made was a Christmas one, along with David Bowie in 1977. On paper it seems the biggest celebrity mismatch since Liz Taylor and that trucker she married, but their rendition of The Little Drummer Boy actually worked really well and is a bit of a classic in its own right.

Similar to the “Holidays Are Comin” Coca Cola ad on the television, there are certain songs that as soon as you hear them, you officially consider Christmas to be up and started. Chris Rea’s Driving Home For Christmas is perhaps the king of such songs. It’s an intelligent song as well by the appearance of it, as I’ve never actually heard it outside a vehicle for some reason…

Ballads and sentimental songs are all very good and atmospheric and everything, but Christmas is so cool that even rock stars regularly queue up to cut a festive record. Slade’s Merry Christmas Everybody is one of the greats, but it very nearly wasn’t. Originally, the air of the chorus was written to be a tripped-out psychedelic number, but it was shelved until they came up with the idea to make a song released for Christmas. And despite recording it in a sweltering studio in August, it’s still quintessentially Christmas.

Even the Beatles took a pop at writing festively, although they were long split up by then. John Lennon and Yoko Ono co-produced (in other words, looked over his soldier every so often and asked “what ya doin?”) the much-loved Merry Christmas (War is Over). Paul McCartney gave it a shot as well with Simply Having A Wonderful Christmas Time, but to say which one of them is better might just start a nasty argument…

So for the most part, Christmas songs are pretty much custard and pudding for the soul, but there’s always one. Wham!, that waste of a perfectly good exclamation mark, are the perpetrators, Last Christmas being the worst single seasonal song ever. As mushy as driven snow, listening to it the whole way through has been known to give you diabetes, and watching the super-cheesy video has been attributed to several cases of temporary blindness. You have been warned…

By: Paddy Duffy

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