Ears around the country and beyond have officially begun hearing it.
No, not 2024 election commercials.
America has popped the cork on Christmas and year-end holiday music.
It trickles in earlier every year, but the sleigh bell songs fully fill the air once the Friday after Thanksgiving arrives. On radio stations. Inside stores. On the phone while on hold, in between reminders that “your call is very important to us.” Maybe even through the outdoors speakers at the gas pumps.
Filling your tank in 20-degree weather while “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” plays overhead is pure yuletide irony.
Tastes in Christmas music tend to be like favorite old sweatshirts — unique to the beholder, shaped by our experiences, comfy and warm, yet often unappealing to others. For me, Bob Dylan growling “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” feels authentic. For others, it sounds like a threat.
This year, seasonal songs take on special meaning as a pandemic alters our traditions. Christmas music may feel like the hugs we’re all missing.
Songs that mean the most usually connect to our childhood, our kids’ first Christmases or holidays spent with loved ones who’ve passed on. The recordings might’ve emanated from vinyl LPs spinning on a big walnut living room stereo, or a car radio or television specials. It could be a song you heard sung by a church choir on Christmas Eve.
I’m a rock-and-roller, but only a few records by artists of that genre crack my list of holiday favorites. Instead, I lean toward singers my parents liked when I was growing up.
My go-to album every November and December is 1968’s “Snowfall” by Tony Bennett, no relation, though that would be cool. A Terre Haute native, late big-band leader and composer Claude Thornhill, wrote the title track. Uncle Tony — again, no relation — could make the “Alphabet Song” sound hip, and he does just that with “My Favorite Things,” even cracking up in the middle.
A healthy stack of Andy Williams’ albums also rested inside my folks’ stereo cabinet. And when his syrupy smooth tenor belts out “It’s the Most Wonderful Time (of the Year),” for those 2 minutes and 30 seconds Christmas feels that way.
The late, great Ray Charles, one of Dad’s favorites, helps deliver a touching moment in the otherwise wacky movie “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.” Charles’ soulful rendition of “The Spirit of Christmas” brings a tear to Clark Griswold’s eye as he watches home movies of his boyhood Christmases while trapped in a chilly attic. The women’s turban, mink stole and gloves Clark dons to fend off the cold mitigate the wistfulness.
Actually, the entire “Christmas Vacation” soundtrack is near to my heart. My wife and I, along with our three kids, have watched it enough to have memorized the script. So, hearing ba-ba-ba-ba-Bing Crosby croon “Mele Kalikimaka,” or Mavis Staples sizzle on the bouncy title track, or Gene Autry’s cowboy stylings on “Here Comes Santa Claus” gives me a hankering for a moose-shaped mug of eggnog.
A rare corps of musicians have created instrumentals that listeners identify with Christmas, even without voices and words. Any track on Vince Guaraldi Trio’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas” mentally transforms me into an 8-year-old, ice skating on a pond with my elementary school classmates (even though I didn’t actually learn to ice skate until years later).
Christmas becomes Christmas in our house when the unmistakable old-codger-style voice of Walter Brennan begins narrating his 1962 album “Old Rivers — ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas Back Home.” We found a CD version several years ago, after the vinyl LP my wife’s family listened to for years faded away. Its sentimentality hasn’t faded a bit, though.
Rock-era artists have produced some decent holiday tunes. If you spend at least a half-hour in a department store, you’re bound to hear Mariah Caray’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” and Jose Feliciano’s “Feliz Navidad,” a brilliant piece of songwriting that uses just 20 words, sung in both English and Spanish. Once ostracized across America for daring to sing a lovely, folksy version of the national anthem at the 1968 World Series, the Puerto Rico-born Feliciano is now a beloved legend who marks the 50th anniversary of the release of “Feliz Navidad” this month.
A year after Feliciano delivered “Feliz Navidad,” former Beatles great John Lennon crafted “Happy Xmas (War is Over).” Its wish of peace — “for black and for white, for yellow and red ones, let’s stop all the fight” — carries particular relevance in 2020.
Amid all the anger, uncertainty, division and anxiety, even the crustiest among us might have a pensive moment one evening this season while climbing into a pickup truck under the supermarket parking lot lights. They start the engine and the radio plays Nat King Cole’s perfect baritone extolling the virtues of “chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” or the improbable duo of Bing Crosby and David Bowie calling for “peace on earth” on “Little Drummer Boy,” or Chris Tomlin’s praise of a savior — the reason for Christmas — on “Joy to the World (Unspeakable Joy).”
A memory might stir in them, and a hope that better times are possible and ahead.
Jazz singer Diana Krall’s 2005 “Christmas Songs” album closes with an Irving Berlin gem. Its central lyric, written nearly seven decades ago, fits this year. “When I’m worried, and I can’t sleep, I count my blessings instead of sheep, and I fall asleep.”
Mark Bennett is a columnist at the (Terre Haute) Tribune-Star. Send comments to [email protected].