Tyler: Peter, Halloween is past. Thanksgiving—well, we don’t really care about that anymore because it’s CHRISTMAS! In November.
Peter: You know in The Philippines they start celebrating in September. So this is nothing.
Tyler: Is that true? That’s not true.
Peter: It is! I learned that from Parts Unknown (or No Reservations). It’s kind of a lot, to be honest. But I am down with this chat today. I’m not a Christmas purist. We’re kicking off the season! Do you make a new Christmas playlist each year? Or do you recycle past mixes?
Tyler: I’ve got two or three from past years that I dig out of the dusty Spotify cupboard. You?
Peter: I like to make a fresh one. I don’t want it to be the same from year to year. I always try to find some new songs to add, and I’ll kick out a few I’ve grown tired of. But probably 95% of the songs I’m listening to are the same from year to year.
Tyler: I love this tradition! That’s terrific.
Peter: Alright, what are we starting with? I’ve been listening to your picks and I have a lot of opinions!
Tyler: Well then, by all means, Peter, I’ll kick us off. Let’s…step into Christmas!
It’s “Step Into Christmas.” That’s the song.
Peter: I’m embarrassed to admit I was not familiar with this one, but it’s a little gem! How did I not know this song?
Tyler: It kinda gets lost, which is a shame. It’s a blast!
Peter: I feel like it doesn’t get played! I’m adding it to my playlist this year. You converted me! It reminds me of that Paul McCartney Christmas song that gets played over and over every year in that they’re both kind of lightweight pop confections. But, hey, sign me up. I like it better than the Paul song.
I will say it goes on a little too long. Cut a minute off that lengthy outro and this thing would really cook.
Tyler: Elton’s has more oomph to my ear. And a nice nod to Christmas music-pioneer/murderer Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound!
Peter: He could really do it all.
Tyler: Phil?
Peter: Yeah, the production, the murdering. Incredible.
Tyler: Now that we’ve really entrenched ourselves in the holiday spirit, let’s pivot to one of those Spector classics! Peter, you’ve brought to the table The Ronettes’ transcendent cut of “Frosty The Snowman.“
Peter: Hells yeah. Goodfellas may not be a Christmas movie, but there are scenes that take place over the holidays and this song is playing in the bar when the gang is celebrating the successful Lufthansa heist. Scorsese presumably picked it because it kicks ass.
Tyler: Oh yeah! I’d forgotten about that!
Peter: I don’t even like “Frosty” as a song, but this version really slaps. It’s also very tight, clocking in just a little over two minutes.
Tyler: That’s all you need.
Peter: Doesn’t mention Christmas but don’t get me started!
Please check the archives for our in-depth conversations about Christmas songs that don’t mention Christmas.
Anyway, I hope everyone re-watches Goodfellas this holiday season.
Tyler: Every season, really.
Peter: Keep stirring the sauce.
Tyler: “Christmas Time Is Here,” Peter! Vince Guaraldi Trio from A Charlie Brown Christmas! This song just is the season for me.
Peter: Yeah, this was going to be on my list as well. What can you even say about it? It’s the sound of Christmas. It’s always on my holiday playlist. Classic.
Tyler: Even the childrens’ choir, such an easy choice to misplay, is perfect.
Peter: I will say that the Peanuts Christmas special is a little overrated. The music is great, and it ends strong, but the first two thirds feel kind of weak to me now.
Tyler: Dear God man it’s a Christmas special.
Peter: Also it’s funny because it’s so overtly religious. They’d shy away from that now I think. Unless it was made for Hallmark or something?
Or no, the Christian Conservative knockoff of Hallmark, because regular Hallmark got uppity with their inclusivity.
It’s like the Great American Family Network or some such.
Tyler: Hallmark? More like Hallwoke.
Peter: Candace Cameron can’t have a lesbian friend, Tyler! She needs her own network!
But I digress. Excellent pick, my friend.
Tyler: It had to be here. And, the explicit Christianity of the Peanuts special is really something in this day and age, I’ll give you that.
So, getting back to pop-rock originals for a moment. Peter, you looped in a song by 2020s titans Bleachers, the brainchild of monumental modern popular presence Jack Antonoff. I know very little about the outfit, and Antonoff, only tuned in to the extent of seeing his name attached to big projects from major artists. I saw Bleachers once on SNL, but they didn’t leave an impression. I think I was biased against them, but now I bear no beef. Good for that dude. And, herewith, the song “Merry Christmas, Please Don’t Call.”
Peter: Yeah, this is a new one. I added it last year, I believe? I saw them perform it on Jimmy Fallon. I like it a lot, though it’s not a very cheery Christmas song. In fact it’s sort of about dealing with a toxic friendship. Antonoff said the song is, “for anyone who has come to realize someone’s been chipping away at them and does not intend to stop.” So, you know, happy holidays?
Tyler: Hey, complex, flickering interpersonal dynamics leading to conflict. Sounds like Christmas!
It’s a good tune. I don’t know their usual production, but I dig that there is, going back to Spector, that wall of sound.
Peter: It’s a runner! We didn’t plan that, but here we are.
I do feel like there are a lot of great Christmas songs that are pretty melancholy. It’s not all presents and egg nog this time of year! People get sad during the holidays too.
Tyler: I think it’s tough for so many folks, of all creeds or lack thereof. Pretty hard to escape the decorative ubiquity of it all.
Let’s make, then, the next selection my choice of Aimee Mann’s “Calling On Mary.”
I heard the sidewalk Santa say, ‘Merry Christmas, merry Christmas’; Salvation’s coming cheap today, merry Christmas.
I’m late to Mann’s music, been really digging into it in recent months, but her dark-night Christmas album, One More Drifter In The Snow, is one that’s been in my rotation for a year or two.
Peter: This was also new to me. I’ve enjoyed a few Aimee Mann songs over the years but I haven’t really explored her discography. This one is pretty, but also a little dark. Her voice always seems to carry a certain kind of sadness. Still, I’m into it. Good one.
Tyler: Something a little more sprightly up next with a selection of yours that really surprised me: John Williams’s orchestration “Somewhere In My Memory,” more prominently recalled as the main title theme to Home Alone.
Peter: I saw Home Alone in the theater on Thanksgiving in 1990. Thursday, November 22, 1990 to be exact. My cousins all climbed into my aunt and uncle’s minivan and my oldest cousin drove us to the theater. It’s a treasured childhood memory.
Tyler: Hell yeah, man. That’s a good one.
Peter: I watch Home Alone every year at Christmas time (and sometimes at Half Christmas on or around June 24-25th). It’s a really special film, and the music is a huge part of it.
Tyler: I can honestly say I have not revisited it since the early ’90s, not long after it took theaters by storm. I don’t have your lovely attachment to it; reflecting upon it now, it’s got a terrific roster of actors with comedic chops. Catherine O’Hara, Daniel Stern, the man Joe Pesci. I never think about the fact that it’s a John Hughes picture, either.
Peter: Oh my God! Tyler, do yourself a favor and re-watch it this year. It’s delightful. Make it a twofer with Goodfellas?
Tyler: A triple-feature if you add The Holdovers. Instant holiday classic, that.
Peter: I haven’t seen that yet!
Tyler: It really is terrific.
Up next, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” A layup for a Beatle loon like myself, but I do think it’s really up there as go secular classics.
Peter: Yeah this is another that I was going to put on my list. John didn’t always make great choices in his solo career (the garbage pile that is Some Time in New York City for example), but this song is a highlight. It’s another one that’s always on my holiday playlist.
Tyler: In typical fashion he wanted to create an anthem. With this one, he pulled it off.
Peter: The kids choir works well.
And Yoko doesn’t ruin it at all.
Tyler: Nope, not a bit. Whatever she had to do with the song works.
Easy to move, then, to your next highlight, a stirring choral performance by the King’s College Choir of “Once in Royal David’s City.”
Peter: The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College in Cambridge, England begins each year with a solo choir boy singing this hymn a capella. We listen to it live every Christmas Eve morning. I normally end up watching multiple Christmas Eve services each year, but this one kicks things off. It’s hard to top. All the lessons are bangers and while some of the hymns change from year to year, the opener and closers are always the same. Hearing that lone choir boy kick off “Once in Royal David’s City,” signals for me that it is on like Donkey Kong. Christmas, baby!
Tyler: The season really hits for you! I mean, I love Christmas a whole damn lot, but you really bring the yuletide. This I mean as a total compliment and point of admiration.
Peter: I try!
I think having a kid really intensifies the Christmas season. It resonates more for me now.
But I’ve always been a fan.
Tyler: We’ve reached the point where I knew it was going to get ridiculous, but I pledge the reckoning means something. Not within galaxies of “Once in Royal David’s City” is my final offering of part one. This one I knew well in youth, from a late-’80s cassette copy of a why-the-hell-not Christmas album from, like, well, American-damn-patriot Lee Greenwood. I’m serious! You have the list, Peter, I’m not pranking you.
For whatever reason, and the thing is not great but it’s relatively inoffensive, my parents developed an affection for the tape, Christmas To Christmas. There are a whole lot of anti-bangers on it, most of which could’ve taken this spot on our list, but I in the end went with “Tennessee Christmas,” which really should be titled “Tender Tennessee Christmas,” so goes the refrain. This would be embarrassing if it didn’t truly resonate with my own childhood memories, be it waking to ol’ Lee blasting my sister and I out of our beds on Christmas morning, to sitting around the coffee table Christmas Eve by the colorful lights of a decorated tree, or other moments back in those days when Christmas was the biggest deal of the year.
Peter: I was going to say you’ve got one more song on the list, and I feel like you’ve got some ‘splaining to do. Lee Greenwood? Seriously? But I knew there’d be some connection to your own treasured childhood memories. I will refrain from all snark and let you have your memories.
Tyler: Oh, Lord, my brother, snark away. It ain’t good.
Peter: We had an Amy Grant Christmas album that occupies a similar place in my heart.
Tyler: You should hear Citizen Greenwood vamp at the end of “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”, the wonder that opens the whole LP. “Oh, don’t throw that snowball at me!”
Peter: Sounds magical!
Tyler: Yeah, let’s not dwell on this. We’ve done right to close with the next song, which I recall from years past is your favorite of all the classics.
Peter: Exactly! “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is my favorite secular Christmas song. There are a lot of great versions. This one, by She & Him, reminds me of a specific time in my life just before my son was born and my wife and I were living in upstate NY. I like the Utopian nature of the song. “From now on our troubles will be out of sight.” Sounds nice!
Tyler: I like it, too. Zooey Deschanel has a such a warm voice, fitting those simple, fine arrangements.
Peter: Yeah, she does a nice job with it. There’s a great version by Mel Torme at the end of Home Alone!
