I feel like a Scrooge sometimes. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the holidays or participate in traditions, it’s just that traditional holiday music leaves something to be desired for me. Unless you’re at the symphony, or watching a performance of The Nutcracker, or attending midnight mass and hearing a great choir, the popular tunes you hear behind every commercial, or coming from every overhead speaker in every store, and those recorded on almost every collection of holiday music by everyone who releases one, is tiresome. My tastes lean toward the less traditional.
For some fun, the 1994 Robert Earl Keen song Merry Christmas From the Family, is a humorous look at a dysfunctional, rural family having a great time at their Christmas party in spite of their differences and pitfalls. It’s among my holiday earworms every year. It opens with “Mom got drunk and Dad got drunk, at our Christmas Party. We were drinking champagne punch and homemade eggnog” and the fun continues from there.
Kathleen Edwards’ It’s Christmastime (Let’s Just Survive), plays out like a suburban version of the Keen tune. It's about a family that’s at least as dysfunctional. While someone at the Keen party has to go to the convenience store for supplies including cigarettes and tampons, in the Edwards tune, Aunty Sue goes “on a really long walk, to buy weed from the swingers who live down the block.”
The holiday events at both of these parties are more raw than dashing through the snow or getting all you want for Christmas, but celebrate real human nature, warts and all, with love and humor.
That, however isn’t what most people are looking for during the holidays.
For more traditional and kid-friendly tunes, I keep going back to Martin Sexton’s Camp Holiday. No matter what Sexton is singing, he sounds gleeful, which makes a song like Holly Jolly Christmas fun to hear. His version of Blue Christmas, one of my favorite Christmas tunes is worth a listen too.
For a jazzier time, Pink Martini’s Joy to the World, takes on a lot of classics and holiday tunes from around the world done in their festive style.
Whatever you’re listening to, I wish you a great holiday season. I’ll probably be listening to Elvis’ Christmas album.
