10 December 02023 (Happy birthday yesterday!): ACME-20/AVMX-14–Misspelling Megan

I’m not prepared to go to war over this, but I think that “Megan” is the right way to spell that name, and not just because that’s how nephice #10 spells it–after all, that wasn’t her choice.  I do take a harsher stance when confronted with “Meghanne” [which seems like it’d invariably be accented on the second syllable] or anything with a “Y” in it, though–there are limits, people*.

That said, I am also not prepared to discard good off-the-beaten-path holiday music over a minor dispute of orthography, and so we have songs 2 and 6.

1. Christmas In The Car, Mulberry Lane.  It’s the second appearance in AVMX for this group.  The song showed up in a Pandora non-holiday stream about a month ago, for which I was less than fully prepared.

On one hand, I like that the focus is from time to time on safety, as the sisters from Nebraska make several references to wearing seat belts.  On another, as this song moves forward in time, there are multiple perspectives possible.  The narrator/singer seems to be happy that she’s moved on from a Porsche Spyder to a 4WD Chevy to a minivan with 3 kids.

I would regard that as something of a step down in the world.

The differing interpretations make this a complicated tune, which makes it a good fit for AVMX.  Possibly too much to think about in the first song out of the chute, but I liked this one as a memorable song to kick off the list, which is one of the things I use as a memory aid (see AVMX-8 for the details).

2. What Present’s This, Megon McDonough.  I very much want to perpetrate the prank at the center of this song, but it would be extremely challenging to pull it off.

Or would it?

Only those who see me this Christmas season will know for sure.

3. This Year's Santa Baby, Eartha Kitt.  I have previously mentioned songs that made the AVMX playlist even though I had not heard of them before the list was ready to compile.

This one, which came out one year after the original SB in 01954, beats even that immediacy.  Once I learned that this song existed, I cleared a space on this year's list before I even listened to it.

It is at once doubly puzzling that this hasn't gotten more airplay over the decades and that it's not been remade frequently along the way.  Here it is for eternity, or at least that homeopathic corner of eternity that visits this outpost of the I'net.

4. Another Christmas Song, Stephen Colbert.  Tom Lehrer, in his spoken introduction to the holiday standard (by my definition) "A Christmas Carol", comments that none of the other holiday standards attempt to capture the "true spirit of Christmas" as it's celebrated in America.

Which is to say (and as he said), the "commercial spirit".

Stephen C. has successfully added to that roster of tunes, which may not stand at much more than 2, with this number.  Bonus points for working in the phrase "ad infinitum".

5. It Was A Silent Night At Least Until Jeff Lynne Arrived, Grandaddy.  Another second-time visitor to AVMX, Grandaddy has shifted focus from the Alan Parsons Project to the Electric Light Orchestra, for no apparent reason–yet somehow this works.

I admit also to being attracted by the notion of a “Silent Night” parody.  There aren’t enough of those out there.

6. Christmas Coupon, Meghan Trainor.  This is Meghan T.’s third appearance on one of these lists.  All 3 songs have checked in at #6–the first two times, that was inadvertent.

Now it’s a tradition.  (I do, after all, work at a place where accidents have this annoying way of becoming precedents.)

The link up there is to the official lyric video, which MT’s production team does very well by channeling Max Fleischer and “follow the bouncing ball”.  Except instead of a ball, it’s Meghan’s animated head.

Nice.

7. Christmas With The Devil, Spinal Tap.  I’m not at all sure what took me so long to highlight this one.  It’s not even been on the relatively recent “late cut” lists, nor even on the running list that lives on my desk 24/7/365**.

Which seems like a tragedy, but one easily corrected.  I kind of think of this song as an ancestor of South Park's "Christmas Time In Hell", dating back to an era when video wasn't quite so essential to selling certain songs.

Enjoy.

8. Christmas In Canada, Eric Bingham-Kumpf.  Once again, we're in "take the composer/performer's word for it" territory in slotting this as a holiday tune.  Following from my note on #7, it's probably the video that sells this 02023 composition as a Christmas song.

9. Christmas In Antarctica, The Minus Five.  It’s technically summer in Antarctica on 25 December, but at least for a few more years, it should still feel appropriately chilly down there then.

Our years-long selection of geographical holiday tunes now extends about as remotely as is possible while remaining on Earth--literally from one end of to the other.

10. Space Christmas, Shonen Knife.  Having reached Antarctica, it is only right that we leave the planet for this year’s final installment.  Shonen Knife is a Japanese group with a long history, so there might be some translation issues with their lyrics, such as when Santa is described as arriving on a "bison sleigh".  That doesn't diminish anything.

Io Saturnalia!

M-->

*–I am a fan of Megyn Price’s work, but her parents dropped the ball in naming her.
**–366 some years, next year included.

10 December 02022 (Happy birthday yesterday!): ACME-19/AVMX-13–Christmas In The Intersection

A couple of years back, I included a picture of a 4-set Venn diagram in AVMX as an illustration of the kind of Christmas crossover that was possible.  As a refresher, here 'tis again:


How desirable that sort of thing may be is for others to decide, probably on a case-by-case basis, but some of this season's selections were very much in the same vein.

1. Marshmallow March, Surfrajettes. Exhibit A: This properly falls in a triple intersection of surf music, instrumentals, and Christmas tunes, so you can omit oval D in the diagram.

That said, there's a lot working against this as a Christmas song.  Let's start with the title, which doesn't exactly speak "Christmas".  "Candy Cane Cha-Cha"?  I could buy that combination as a holiday tune.  Similarly for something like "Sugarplum Samba", or possibly "Gingerbread Gavotte" (which really belongs on a hypothetical Carly Simon holiday album).  "Marshmallow March", though?  The candy--while something I enjoy--is not exactly a high-profile Christmas, or even December, treat.  Indeed, I suspect that many of us associate marshmallow much more strongly with the holiday at the other end of Christ's life.

It could make a little more sense for Christmas as "Marzipan March", I suppose, but we play the hand we're dealt around here.  However, I have come rather to like this song over the course of several listenings trying to tease out the holiday connection.  I'm content to take the artists' declaration at face value.

2. The Fruitcake That Ate New Jersey, Lauren Mayer.  Exhibit B:  Lauren Mayer is a musical theater enthusiast who dabbles also in comedy and, clearly enough, Jewish culture, which gives us another 3-way intersection.  Fruitcake sat in obscurity for decades before surfacing in 02010.  The song is taken from the album Latkes, Schmatkes!, a collection of Hanukkah-friendly tunes.

This may not be the sort of thing that the ecumenical movement is trying to encourage.

3. I Got A Cheese Log, Trout Fishing In America.  Despite the fact that this is turning into a comedy block*, putting together a run of songs mentioning, though not always about, food was irresistible.  In the future when I'm trying to remember all of these songs in order when far from the I'net, that will be useful to me.

When you try to set up a comedy channel on Pandora, you wind up hearing a lot of automatically generated suggestions that are only comedy-adjacent:

• Musical theater pieces, only some of which qualify as comedy.  This connects up to #2.
  
• Folk music, to which the same description applies.
• Children's songs, from which this one is drawn.  Again, while there may be funny songs included in this subgenre, not every one fits that description.  Much of Schoolhouse Rock's various programming is available, but I wouldn't call every one of those pieces comedy.  (For example, Figure Eight, which was inexplicably [to me] described once in a book as the "most popular" of the Multiplication Rock series, is not all that funny, even with the video.)
  

Some judicious use of the editing functions makes it possible to curate something that rises to reasonable standards of humor, and includes tunes like this one.  See also the Caroleers from AVMX-11.

4. The Happiest Time Of The Year, Candypants.  And the food theme continues in the name of the artist.  Speaking of ecumenism, this may well be the finest Christmas song ever that mentions Iran--an ardently non-Christian country--in the lyrics.

Admittedly, that's a small universe, but one looks for good where one can.  (The Capitol Steps probably recorded such a song at one point; I've not looked back fully.)

This is almost certainly the darkest song I've ever included in AVMX.  While this was unintentional, since I just like the song, it is another piece of data in support of my thesis that there's room enough in Christmas for everybody.

5. White Christmas (3:00 Weather Report), Bobby The Poet.  Once again, we have a mutil-level parody.  This tune takes the idea expressed oh-so-seriously (reasonably so, and very well) in Simon & Garfunkel's 7:00 News/Silent Night (AVMX-2) and treats it somewhat more whimsically.  The artist's name and performing voice add up to a two-way parody on both Robert F. Kennedy and Nobel laureate Bob Dylan.  This is certainly one of the most obscure songs I've ever highlighted in AVMX.  I'm not fully convinced that this is a good thing, but the idea is kind of fun, the tune is pleasant enough, and the coincidences are too amusing to pass by, so it's worth a few listens every year going forward.

6. Naughty List, Meghan Trainor.  Back toward the mainstream here, even as we duplicate a title from AVMX-5.

Let's be honest here: "Naughty list" is a richer source of good popular culture than "Nice list".  The sinners, it is said, are much more fun**.

7. Shake Hands With Santa Claus, Louis Prima.  The link here is to a 01951 recording of this song, which makes it one of the most seasoned recordings ever to be a part of AVMX and certainly worthy of this year's throwback tune title.

Fun fact: The first 7 songs this year each have a run time under 3 minutes.  It helps, I suppose, if your holiday song doesn't have 5 verses.

8. Sugar And Booze, Ana Gasteyer.  We return to the food theme as we finally bust through the 3-minute barrier, with the title track to an album I tapped a couple of years back.  One of the reasons for slotting this song here is that it's musically not unlike #7, just coming along decades later.

Another reason for including it at all is that it's been cleared as "safe" for Little Drummer Boy Challenge players, even though it mentions The Boy and throws in a "pa-rum-pum-pum-pum".  Since the reference is both brief and less than fully musical (Ana doesn't really sing the risky drumbeat), which renders this safe.  In the words of LDBC master Michael Alan Peck, "it's not the tune, so it doesn't count."  I got taken out by a Capitol Steps parody one year, so this kind of edge case matters to me.

A third, and really the only necessary, reason is that this is an entertaining tune that's also funny.  The link up there is to a live performance on Late Night With Seth Meyers, in which the xylophone part is played on a toy instrument.  Kind of a neat effect.

9. Santa Claus Is Watching You, Ray Stevens.  This one was one of the last-second cuts last year, as more notable songs showed up on my radar.  It deserves to be here.

There are times when a backlog needs clearing, and this is one of those.

10. Melt! Goes The Snowman, Nooshi.  This comes from an album that promises Christmas songs with familiar melodies.  I stumbled across it while indiscriminately looking for unheralded Christmas music, and just reading the title made me laugh.  Out loud.  At that point, the bar that needed clearing was suddenly a lot less high.

I appreciate the word choice that went into the lyrics.  "Plop Goes The Snowman" was right there, but the writer went another, better, way.

It's a nice wrapup to another decet of alternate (not "alternative") holiday tunes.

Io Saturnalia!

M-->

*--Not that I find anything wrong with that, but I try occasionally to break up the funny stuff with other songs.
**--Apologies to Billy J.

I see that Sirius/XM has 19 channels dedicated to playing Christmas music.
There aren't 19 Christmas songs!

Certainly it seems like that sometimes.  It is in part for that reason that I continue this dodecade-long quest of spotlighting underplayed songs o’ the season.

Seasons, actually.

1. It’s (Already) Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas, Capitol Steps.  Though the Steps are no more (The Markives, 2 March 02021), their legacy lives on.  This one shares my sentiment about the expansion of the winter holidays well beyond their right and proper starting date.

However one might define “right and proper”, of course, which in any event shouldn’t be before Thanksgiving.

2. Traditions of Christmas, Mannheim Steamroller.  I’ve not included any MS tunes on these lists until this year, largely because of the remake factor.  After digging a bit, I turned up this original from their second album, so we have the sounds of the Steamroller with the added advantage of new holiday music.

That’s a win/win, from where I type.

That said, this song also exists with lyrics.  While ditching the words may make this a little more difficult to tag as a holiday tune (we kind of need to fall back on “Mannheim Steamroller, despite its range of works,  is largely and perhaps unfairly known for Christmas music”, which is less than fully satisfying), I prefer the instrumental version, and so that’s what’s linked up there.

3. Star of Wonder, Roches.  A study in contrasts presents itself here.  Right after an instrumental holiday tune, we have...an a cappella number.

Put it all together (though you shouldn't) and you have two complete songs with both music and lyrics.  But they're really better off appreciated separately.

4. Santa Claus Is Coming To My House, Karla DeVito.  24 hours ago, I didn't know that this song existed.  Now it's been immortalized on this ever-expanding list.

Owing to the nature of the calendar and the radio stations I listen to, a lot of the research for each year's AVMX list happens 11+ months beforehand, after the previous year's list goes live and I start hearing a wider range of holiday tunes.  I was, as is my nature, casting about the I'net last night looking for inspiration and came across hipchristmasmusic.com, which is a gold mine of the obscure and unjustly neglected among holiday music.  Also at least a silver mine of songs that deserve their obscurity, but one learns to take the bad with the good in projects like this.

The net effects of this calendar quirk are that 3 songs were taken off the original version of this year's list and replaced by late-breaking discoveries, and there are already at least a dozen tunes in the holding pen for 02022.  Sometimes songs that seem like good choices in mid-December don't hold up so well when revisited the following early December.

As to this number: Karla D. is perhaps best known for her album Is This A Cool World Or What?, from which this song is not taken.  The album cover made it a favorite at Winter Camp back in the days when Winter Camps could be counted with single Arabic digits.

5. Strangest Christmas Yet, Steve Martin & The Steep Canyon Rangers.  Because when you can highlight a combination of holiday comedy and some of the best banjo playing ever recorded, you don’t ask questions.
       
I want to believe that the home movies shown in the video are actual family footage rather than something put together for this project, but my willful naivete only extends so far.

6. My Kind of Present, Meghan Trainor. I have organized the collection (now 121 tunes) of AVMX music into a variety of overlapping subcategories, which is useful when I’m fast-forwarding through the flash drive that houses the whole list looking for certain types of holiday music.  A category that’s kind of new this year is “Fun, but not necessarily funny”, which I’ve mentioned as an idea several times (both of Jimmy Buffett’s contributions, for example) but not quite formalized before.

This song qualifies.  I like MT’s work in general, but she went off a cliff for a while there after All About That Bass and Title, revealing herself in Dear Future Husband and Lips Are Movin’ to be what Harry Burns would have called a “high-maintenance woman”.  It’s good to see that she has pulled back from that edge a bit.

7. Cozy Little Christmas, Katy Perry. Kind of a double shot here, with #6.  Two songs by popular singers who recorded something new for the holidays.  This is a trend that I like.

There was a third song that was on the edge of making this a trio (which was not one of the 3 late cuts), but I has a suspicion that it might blow up and get too much exposure sometime soon.  If I’m wrong, which is likely, maybe we’ll see it in 02022.

8. You Ain’t Getting Diddly Squat, Heywood Banks.  I take requests, provided they're consistent with the format.

I woke up on the morning of 1 December with this song running through my head, which I interpret as evidence that the universe wants it in AVMX.

Far be it for me to deny the universe a simple request that is consistent with the format around here: a fun little number that isn’t overplayed in the annals of Christmas comedy.

9. Warm December, Sabrina Claudio.  You might want to send the kids out of the room for this one.

The video here isn’t over any decency lines that concern me*, but it’s Right. Up.  Against.  The Line. in a number of places.

Feature or bug?  You be the judge.

Optical matters aside, this is a nice little tune that is probably getting all of the attention it can.

10. Santa Island, Na Leo.  After #9, a more upbeat–one might even go so far as to say “peppier”–song seems called for to close out this list.  And there’s usually something peppy among the music of Hawaii, including but certainly not limited to the holiday tunes.   After all, the ukulele, like the banjo, is not an instrument on which to play the blues.

Io Saturnalia!

M–>

*–If indeed such lines even exist, which is an iffy proposition.

You can’t really hate covers until you’ve heard the Carly Rae Jepsen version of Last Christmas.

Maybe there should be a different list of Christmas covers we don’t need. Like anyone other than Jose Feliciano doing Feliz Navidad.

10 December 02019 (Happy birthday [L. = L] yesterday!): ACME-16/AVMX-10--Another 10 Gestures, Or "I've been at this for a decade?  How did that happen?"

That asked, it's been a good year for finding holiday comedy--about 50% of the mix this year, depending on how one counts #8.  So we'll start out with something else entirely.

1. Christmas Night In Harlem, Raymond Scott Quintette.  The conductor/arranger of scads of cartoon music (check out "Powerhouse") shifts his band toward the holidays.  This is another Christmas instrumental, so it's a matter of looking carefully for where the holiday influence has been assembled.  You may find it necessary simply to trust the title.

2. Elf's Lament, Barenaked Ladies. It's time for something upbeat, and to clear the 11-month wait on the list for this tune.  As I've mentioned before, a lot of Christmas hymns sound more like funeral marches than anything remotely celebratory.  The winter holidays are supposed to be at least a little bit enjoyable.  Of course, the point of this tune is that the elves regard the holiday runup as somewhat less than enjoyable, which is a perspective worth thinking about in a hypothetical world where elves exist.

If it makes life easier for some elves, "naughty" sounds that much more appealing.

3. Christmas Eve Eve, Paul and Storm.  Another song extolling Christmas Adam and thus pushing the envelope on the duration of the holiday season.  (Where was this last year when I was putting together a run of songs about the days leading right up to Christmas?)  The opening line of this song is "Today we sing the praises of December 23rd", which one can only hope means that there are 365 other songs out there in a similar vein.

Okay, so that's among the longer of shots.  (Right down there with the hope that Lou Gramm's 01987 song "Midnight Blue" was part 1 of a 64-part salute to Crayola crayons.)  That said, I like the fact that this song steals some of Good King Wenceslas' too-long-held thunder by also noting that 26 December is the feast of Stephen.

4. Santa Claus' Party, Les Baxter.  Here's one of the customary throwback pieces.  The much-derided-around-here chorales might do well to sing this a bit more and "Sleigh Ride" a bit less.

Make that a lot less.

5. Santa Claus Meets The Purple People Eater, Sheb Wooley.  Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times...ah, then you're on to something.  I think I've discovered a pattern:

        "Flying Saucer" by Dickie Goodman was soon followed by "Santa and the Satellite".
        "Monster Mash" by Bobby "Boris" Pickett led to "Monster's Holiday" (as heard on AVMX-9).
        The Royal Guardsmen followed up "Snoopy vs. The Red Baron" with "Snoopy's Christmas" (AVMX-2).

In short:

Figuring out the tunes for this year's collection of overlooked holiday music wasn't too tough.  (There was one incident: Over at KQNG-FM, where morning man Ron Wiley doesn't ordinarily play any Christmas music until mid-December, he made an exception and aired something that was basically a mashup of lyrics from many many tunes in kind of a clever way.  Unfortunately, I didn't hear the title or artist, and the online program guide didn't include it.  Had I been able to track that one down, it'd've been here in place of...something.  As it is, I'll be on the hunt for it for next year.)

Putting the 10 songs in a coherent or approximately coherent order was the challenge.  This matters in part because I've built a memory game around the 90 songs that have been included in this ongoing experiment.  Said game works better if I have an order to each year's playlist, and I was trying to come up with an ordered lineup for this batch that made sense.  There were a couple of blocks of songs that made sense in succession, but it wasn't easy to string all 10 together in a way that felt right.

This is the best arrangement I could come up with.

1. Yabba-Dabba Yuletide, Brian Setzer Orchestra.  We begin with a holiday song that borrows the tune of the opening theme song to The Flintstones.  That makes it appropriate as a leadoff entry for this block o' tunes.  It puts the fun into the holiday season, which is important to me.  This fills the "11 months on the waiting list" position for 02018, as I first heard it last December when driving between Albion and Findlay, after AVMX-8 went live.

We now move into a run of pieces loosely organized around the December holiday calendar.

2. Ring Out Solstice Bells, Jethro Tull.  Yep, another one aimed (by me, not by the band [I assume]) at the "war on Christmas" warriors.  Since the winter solstice predates Christmas itself by a few days, the calendar watch starts here.

3. Christmas C'mon, Lindsey Stirling feat. Becky G.  Once the solstice hits, the countdown to Christmas, already in single digits, takes on new urgency--and even, perhaps, a certain impatience.  One thing about this song: Lindsey S. is a talented violinist, which comes through in the music, but I shall ever have two thoughts about electric violins:
    a. That's just a funny-looking instrument.
    b. That's still an odd choice for the cover of a calculus book.
The joke is on me, of course, as James Stewart's Calculus: Concepts and Contexts is one among his collection of some of the best-selling calculus textbooks of all time.  A crown it deserves to wear, in my opinion.  I've taught out of that book once or twice, and it seems like a good one.

4. Christmas Eve, Blackmore's Night.  The calendar ticks forward to 24 December.

5. On This Christmas Day, Moody Blues.  And rolls forward one more day, to Xmas itself.  Combined with #2, this gives kind of a classic rock feel to the first part of this list.

On now to less temporal matters, and some holiday laughter.

6. Monster's Holiday, Bobby "Boris" Pickett.  It bugs me, as a comedy aficionado, that polls or lists of the "worst songs of all time" (Christmas or otherwise) frequently heap a disproportionate amount of scorn on novelty songs, this one included.  Not everything can be "A Day In The Life", most artists shouldn't try to write something like that, and sometimes you just want a fun tune.  (As with movies, it's not necessary that every song make a person think.)  While this is no "Monster Mash" (not much is), it qualifies on that third point.

With that comedy break taken, we move now to three artists making their second appearance on these lists.  One of the three continues the comedy; the other two are certainly fun bordering on funny.

7. Cherry Cherry Christmas, Neil Diamond.  It takes a certain level of nerve to splice "Cherry Cherry" in for "Very Merry" in a holiday greeting, and then another level to write a song name-checking a couple of other ND non-Christmas songs among the lyrics.  Such nerve is exhibited very nicely here.

8. Ho Ho Ho And A Bottle of Rhum, Jimmy Buffett.  The idea of combining the traditional pirate chant with Santa's laugh is a good one, and Jimmy Buffett is the ideal singer to pull it off.  As I said on 20 November 02010 when introducing JB's "Christmas In The Caribbean" as the first song on the first one of these lists, Björk could not carry this out with anywhere near this level of authenticity.

9. Good King Kong Looked Out, P.D.Q. Bach.  P.D.Q. didn't do a lot of direct parodies, although he wrote many of what Weird Al Yankovic would later come to call "style parodies".  This one kind of straddles the line between the two.

Now, as we began with some opening credits music, we close out this set with an instrumental work that could easily be the bed over which closing credits might run.  Additionally, this song debuted in 01964, making it a worthy choice for the "overlooked by time" category that I like to include once per set.

10. Jingo Jango, Bert Kaempfert.  One of the notable things about this song is that it illustrates the minimum amount of content necessary to get a song tagged as a Christmas song.  In this case, that would be an occasional track of sleigh bells in and among the other instruments.  Other than that, this could set toes to a-tapping even in April or August.  Between JJ and the theme to the original Match Game, Bert surely cashed a lot of nice royalty checks.

Io Saturnalia!

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You can take your snow and shove it.

It’s that time again.  Here are ten more songs that would make all-Christmas all the time radio much more pleasant to listen to, if they ever got any real airplay.

1. The Atheist Christmas Carol, Vienna Teng.  Case in point.  In spades.

Not that this one stands a snowball’s chance in a forest fire of getting much radio exposure.  But consider the opening lyrics:

It's the season of grace coming out of the void
Where man is saved by a voice in the distance

There’s no mention of a supreme being or the lack thereof, and I suspect that most people, regardless of their spiritual leanings, could get behind this sentiment.  The song continues in a similar vein for its remaining 17 lines, and the message triumphs over the title, if you ask me.

Stripped of the title (rename it "Season of Grace", maybe), this could be a “new holiday classic”.  It's certainly preferable to "All I Want For Christmas Is You", which is generally acknowledged to be the most recent song to join the Christmas canon*.  With its title, forget about that.  Nonetheless, one of my most deeply-held holiday convictions is that “there’s room enough in Christmas for everyone”, and that applies here, perhaps more than anywhere else.  At a time when even Pope Francis has been caught saying some nice things about atheists, this seems an appropriate contribution to holiday tunedom.

2. 2000 Miles, The Pretenders.  This one was featured on an episode of Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, a show to which I have an unusual attachment, as you may know.  I got to it via a back route not involving that show, which may explain why it’s taken awhile to show up on one of these lists.

This is also a case where it’s good to go back to the original artist–KT Tunstall’s version was the one that triggered my interest, last December after Volume 5 went up, but I have rather strong feelings about holiday remakes.

3. Nutcracker, Straight No Chaser.  I am not a fan of ballet in general, nor of The Nutcracker in particular.  This surprises no one.  That said, I was drawn in part to this tune by a recent Dear Prudence column involving a meddlesome grandmother whose 11-year-old granddaughter had apparently made it a mission not to see said ballet, and who wanted to know if she could force the child to submit to a performance.

In a word, no.

But kudos to that child for staking out this position and sticking to it.

And kudos also to SNC for taking down that ballet in such fine fashion.

4. Chiron Beta Prime, Jonathan Coulton.  Because if you were forcibly relocated to an alien planet by robot overlords, you would surely have cause to mention that in your holiday newsletter.

One might even argue that that’d be a pretty good reason to start such a newsletter.

5. Warm Lovin’ Christmastime, Wilson Phillips.  There’s no real reason to avoid this song, which I mentioned a few years back (The Markives, 5 December 02010) as a Mellowmas entry logged over at popdose.com.  Mellowmas is ending after this holiday season (though surely the flow of bad holiday tunes will not), so this is a chance to recognize one song they highlighted that turned out not to be awful.  And as I said in 02010, in a tribute to dexterity:


That still holds, five years later.

6. Rootin’ Tootin’ Santa Claus, Tex Beneke & His Orchestra. This year's flashback entry, it comes with an instrumental opening that's over a minute long.  Music doesn't get more radio-friendly than that.

7. Christmas Is My Favorite Time Of Year, Lizzie & John Brenkus.  On the face of it, there’s a lot about this song that’s awful:

•   It pretty much hits every Christmas cliche in the book.
•   It rhymes “year” with “good cheer”.  This bugs me, for some inexplicable (by me) reason.
•   The lyrics include the line “Shelves have elves”, thus mentioning one of the more puzzling/annoying newish holiday fads.
•   Its abuse of the English language includes the phrase “full of Yule”.  I’m not sure what that implies.  It’s not like Yule, as I understand it, is a tangible product.

And yet...the tune is just so unabashedly catchy and–dare I say it?–fun that I can’t resist it.

8. Naughty List, Forever In Your Mind.  Because someone needs to stick up for the kids getting coal in their stockings.  And because this is kind of amusing, and different from the typical tone of Christmas songs--which is something I like to recognize.

9. Nicki And The Crew, Treetop Sisters.  I stand against the introduction of children's choirs into holiday music with as much commitment as anyone.  The fact that these children are not a choir is enough to get this otherwise-worthy song onto this year's list.  In additional, this song also ticks the "other late December holidays" box by mentioning Christmas Adam.

In the world of overfamiliarity that I was touching on last entry, I'm willing to carve out an exception for calling Santa Claus "Nicki", in no small part because of its sheer brazenness.  "St. Nick"--common.  "Nicki"--not so much.  Well-played.

(This song does refer to Rudolph as "Rudy", though, so maybe it should be included with an asterisk.)

10. Save Some Snow, After Romeo. Once again, the list features a song that's been sitting in limbo since I first found it last December.  Off now to monitor the radio in search of the song to fill this slot for 02016.

Io Saturnalia!

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*--Christmas Canon, by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, hasn't even cracked that list.  Seems like it'd be an obvious choice.

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10 December 02014: ACME-11--Or, A Very Markives Christmas, Volume 5

One thing that hits me each year as I start assembling this alternate playlist is "Where am I going to find 10 (ish) more overlooked holiday tunes that are actually good as I define the term?".  It turns out that it's not much of a chore, just a matter of paying attention and looking under a metaphorical rock or two.  There's a lot of good holiday music away from what lands on ACATT radio, and it's a very minor tragedy that the programmers at those stations don't expend the effort to find it.

I do what I can.  Enjoy this year's tunes.

1. Hanukkah In Santa Monica, Tom Lehrer.  We start off the 02014 alternate holiday soundtrack with a more-obscure-that-it-deserves-to-be tune from what might, in mainstream America, be called an alternative holiday.  The committed wordplay that rhymes "Shavuos" with "East St. Louis" here is criminally unrecognized.

2. Fa La La, Elizabeth Chan. Ms. Chan has taken on writing Christmas songs as a full-time obsession, and claims to have written over 300 original holiday tunes.  It's nearly axiomatic that at least one of those would be good, and so we have here "Fa La La".  There's an extended Hanukkah reference in here as well, which provides a nice connection to #1 and the rest of the late December holidays.

It's also nearly axiomatic that at least one of those songs would be awful.  "Vixen" fits that bill, perhaps in the "so bad, it's almost good" department.  While clearly not safe for work or for small children*, the sheer audacity of lines like "I want a map to Santa's lap" is close to amusing.

3. Text Me Merry Christmas, Straight No Chaser featuring Kristen Bell. Here's what I said about this tune when I first discovered it via a Beth Cochran Facebook post last month:

Excellent! This is far far better than the Nth remake of "The Little Drummer Boy" or other Xmas catastrophes of earlier generations.

I stand by every word of that comment.

Every.

Word.

4. Christmas In Nebraska, Mulberry Lane. Continuing the holiday travelogue subseries (Caribbean, California, Las Vegas, Heaven, Ground Zero[?]) here.  I've never been to Nebraska, but I respect home-state loyalty as much as most, and this sisters' group named after the street where they grew up has recorded a decent-enough argument for the Cornhusker State.  There's not a lot that's been written about Nebraska, so this should make most short lists of the finest tunes referencing that chunk of the Midwest.

Right behind "I Look In Your Face...And I See Omaha", of course.

5. Alan Parsons In A Winter Wonderland, Grandaddy.  I am a big fan of Alan Parsons' work, both as a producer and engineer and as a performer with and without the Project.  Even without that predilection to enjoy something like this, I think I'd've found this another Christmas comedy classic.  Why Parsons?  It's not immediately clear from the lyrics--but when the song doubles down on the title character with the lines "In the meadow we can build a snowman/And pretend that he is Alan Parsons", the song's true comedic genius is revealed much more clearly.  This could, of course, also work with other semi-celebrities with four-syllable names--Robert Mitchum, say, or perhaps Kathy Griffin.

The original "WW" (like "Jingle Bells", "It's A Marshmallow World", and "Let It Snow", among others) isn't a Christmas tune, nor does this parody mention 12/25 explicitly.  However, since I take an expansive view of December music, this works for me.  Well done, Grandaddy.

6. I Found The Brains Of Santa Claus, Jason and the Strap-Tones. This one is finally appearing on one of these lists after being the last song cut in 02012 (a little too comedy-heavy that year, I thought) and 02013 (13 songs was enough).  Silly in a good way.

Now...The juxtaposition between #6 and #7 constitutes approximately a 100% change in tone, but jarring transitions are an essentially unavoidable component of holiday radio as it's practiced in America these days.

7. You Make It Christmas, Betty Buckley.  Here's a holiday song, 01930's in tone, 01990's in pedigree, from Remember WENN, the TV show that I would argue started AMC's transition away from its declared classic film niche. The channel was eventually targeted by a lawsuit in New York (The Markives, 9-10 August 02005) challenging their commitment to truth in advertising, although it was less WENN and more the Three Stooges that prompted that action.  In addition, there are the tips o' hats to other holidays that I so respect when picking tunes for this series.

8. Jingle My Bells, The Boy Least Likely To.  Each December since I've started this thing of alternate holiday playlists, it seems as though I find at least one new-to-me holiday tune right after I post the year's list, and so it was in 02013 with this one.  The artist and title leave one suspecting that this should be a novelty song, but that's not really the case.

9. Merry Christmas You Suckers, Paddy Roberts.  This one, on the other hand, is pure comedy.  Props, too, for rhyming "splendid" with "distended".  In a very real sense, this strikes me as a somewhat more accurate version of the Markives-derided "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas", right down to the line "It may be your last", which was originally part of "Merry Little" and is cut from most recorded versions.

10. Forever Christmas, Afterglow.  Afterglow is a Utah-based band, and I first heard this song while driving between Las Vegas and Zion National Park last December--again, not too long after ACME-10 went live.  I haven't heard it since (okay, I haven't tried too hard), but it stuck with me as another worthy entry here.

Io Saturnalia!

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*--Seriously.  Use considerable caution if clicking through.

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12 December 02013: ACME-10: Songs For All Seasons

This year's Christmas music entry takes a slightly wider--in several senses of the word--view of the winter holidays.

1. At Christmas Time, Dan Fogelberg.  In a nod to the original meaning of the season, this one starts off with the line "At Christmas time we raise our hearts* and celebrate the solstice."  Hear that, "War On Christmas" warriors?  Solstice.  This also works in the "Lighten Up, America!" subgenre around here.  No further commentary required.  (Dan F., by the way, got a mention on last night's Late Night With David Letterman in the show's annual holiday music Top Ten list.)

2. Christmas In California, America. I like a bit of geographical diversity in my holiday tunes.   Hence "Christmas In The Caribbean" on the first holiday mix (02010) and #2 and 3 this year.

3. Christmas In Las Vegas, Richard Cheese.  Speaking of geography, this also fulfills my commitment to include comedy in these annual lists.  There's no mention of Christmas lights on cactus, but that's about all that's missing.

4. Christmas Lights, Blush. I've been sitting on this one since I heard it on the radio last year after ACME-9 went up.  Another Sirius find, at least originally for me--which means that it's been scribbled on a  scrap of paper on my desk for months now, as is my nature with ACME's.

5. Whistle 'Neath The Mistletoe, Briana Winter. A second Sirius find, this one was released last year on an "indie" album.  I've been listening, very occasionally, to Pandora's Indie Holiday Music channel, and I find most of it way too dull for my tastes--many artists in that genre seem to have forgotten the notion that Christmas should be, at some level, enjoyable..  This one manages to avoid the worst of the darkness of indie music.

Time to shift gears a bit.  I have decided that, to my ears, the folks who damage most traditional holiday hymns for radio airplay are the singers, and that some hymns which don't work because of the pseudo-operatic bellowing that many folks bring to the table are perfectly fine tunes when performed without vocals.  The challenge there is finding the songs for which the lyrics aren't so well-known (and overblown, in many cases) that they earworm their way into your brain.  "O Holy Night", for example, can't be saved by giving the singers the day off--it's hard to hear the tune without thinking of the lyrics, often being sung badly.  You need the vocals to exist--it's hard to tag a song as a Christmas tune without them**--but if they can be fully and completely jettisoned from the performance and from your mind, what's left is sometimes worthwhile listening.

The cutoff, I have determined, is "Carol of the Bells".  Yes, it's got lyrics, but they're somewhat obscure, often confusing***, and probably not, in the large, familiar enough to be an earworm.  So here's a shift to lesser carols that work better instrumentally.

6. Jesu, Joy Of Man's Desiring, Alon Goldstein.  The link here is to an organ version, but there are certainly other instrumental arrangements that work.  So long as the choir has the night off.

7. The Holly and the Ivy, George Winston.  There's no reason to prefer one piano arrangement over any other, but I kind of like this one anyway.  George W.'s December album does a good job with the holiday tunes.

8. Some Children See Him, George Winston.  See note on #7.

Back to songs with words now.

9. Jingle Jingle Jingle, Stan Francis (from the Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer soundtrack).  Back to the fun stuff.  This one deserves a higher profile than it has.  Not that this listing will help.

10. Nutrocker, Trans-Siberian Orchestra.  What I find interesting about this piece is that it was first released on a non-holiday album (Night Castle).  For a band that's primarily known for their takes on holiday tunes, this is an impressive stretch.  (The title of TSO's recent EP, Dreams of Fireflies on a Christmas Night, makes one wonder a bit about the geographical authenticity of their name.  I doubt that there are many fireflies traversing Tunguska in late December.  It's geographical diversity in a good sense, I suppose.)

11. You Make It Feel Like Christmas, Neil Diamond.  Also originally released on a non-holiday album (Primitive).  This is a trend that I enjoy for some reason.

We time-travel backwards for the music and forward on the calendar for the last two songs on this year's holiday mix.

12. The Man With The Bag, Kay Starr.  This version is pretty definitive, even if it may not be the original.  Remakers should leave it alone.

13. What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?, Ella Fitzgerald.  Ditto.  There is, I am convinced, a place for more NYE music than currently exists.

Io Saturnalia!

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*--I'm not sure how that works either.
**--Exception: Linus and Lucy, although if someone later went all Mitchell Parish and retconned lyrics to that tune, I don't need to hear them.
***--See A South Park Christmas, where "Ding dong m'kay" makes perfect sense.

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10 December 02012: ACME-9--Something Old and Something New

In writing the 2012 annual Christmas music entry, I find myself reconsidering my stance against "The Twelve Days of Christmas" in these yearly missives.  Norm MacDonald's take on the song is one thing that's turned me --well, maybe not around, but certainly aside:

Also contributing to this reassessment is the Allan Sherman collection My Son, The Box*, in which we find that his version, "The Twelve Gifts of Christmas", was censored at original release.  Here's a 21st-century take on the original:

With that song--in its original form--kicking off this year's holiday lineup, here's the rest of the best for 02012:

2. Christmas Can-Can, Straight No Chaser.  SNC also has an interesting take on "12 Days".  This song title and artist have been scrawled on a Post-It on my desk for about 12 months now--just after ACME-8 went up last year.  It could have made for an interesting puzzle if someone, in the event of my untimely demise, had been cleaning out my office and found it.

3. Christmas In The Sand, Colbie Caillat.  New for 02012 is this reminder that a white Christmas might very well refer to sand and not to snow.  It's got an entertaining video as well.

4. Christmas Kiss, Meaghan Smith.  This showed up, rather unexpectedly, in my Pandora feed about 6 weeks ago.  Properly promoted, I submit that this could be a "Call Me Maybe" for the holidays.  It's got the right level of flirtatiousness without descending to Maudlin Town.  Ms. Smith also does a rendition of "The Little Drummer Boy" without all the "pa-rum-pum-pum-pum"s.  It doesn't make the song better except in that it makes it shorter, but it's an interesting idea.  Once.

5. Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?, Nina Van Pallandt.  Yes, it's a holiday tune from a James Bond movie (On Her Majesty's Secret Service).  The universe can still amaze me sometimes.  This turns out to be a fairly complicated little number, in a good way and a way that a lot of more well-known holiday tunes are not.

6. Let's Have A Drug-Free Christmas, Tim Cavanagh.  Nice sentiment in the title, plus one must admire the wordplay in the lyric "Spend the day on Grandma's farm/Not on pharmaceuticals".

7. Happy New Year, Spike Jones & The City Slickers.  Fulfilling the "old" in the title, this one has an odd personal connection for me.  The song is a recitation of various Slickers' New Year's resolutions, and one near the end is a commitment to better comedy leading up to the line: "I resolve not to tell a corny joke."  A telephone then rings, and Doodles Weaver's side of the conversation goes "Hello.  What's that?  The church burned down?  Holy smoke!".

An epic fail for the resolution, of course, but...I actually got to use that last line, completely in context, once, upon hearing of a church fire here in the current hometown of The Markives.  Definitely a moment to be remembered.

And now for something in a more classical vein:

8.  Throw The Yule Log On Uncle John, PDQ Bach.  I am not for a minute advocating this course of action, but just in case, it might be best if Haley, Sarah, Megan, and Natalie didn't click through on this one.

Io Saturnalia!

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*--MS,TB was released in 02004.  Though I bought it right away, I'm a bit slow in talking about it here.

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9 December 02011 (Happy birthday!): ACME-8--Another Round Of Worthy Holiday Music

It had been my plan since about last February for the next annual Christmas music entry to be "Remakes That Don't Suck".  However, after spending way too much time in 02011 considering some of the most ill-conceived ideas ever re-recorded, I have dropped that plan.  I only found three, one of which is kind of questionable.  While they're included below, here's my 2K11 holiday mix:

1. "Santa Baby", Madonna.  Eartha Kitt did a fine job with the original, and the mid-01980's version of Madonna was a dead-on accurate choice for this version.  Laurie happens to like this tune, which is not an insignificant consideration.

2. "Deck Us All With Boston Charlie", from Pogo.  Last year's list included a "Deck the Halls" parody as the #2 track, and this one seems to be an appropriate followup--and possibly the start of a tradition around here.  The linked version here only includes the first verse--there may be five more in the canonical list, but the first is the best by a wide margin, from both musical and technical perspectives.

3. "Snoopy's Christmas", Royal Guardsmen.  As long as we've got one comic strip tune here, let's keep the theme going.

4. "Christmastime Is Here", Vince Guaraldi and Orchestra.  Three in a row from the comics.  (I'll stop now.)  Here's a holiday tune that should just not ever be remade.  What Toni Braxton did to this song is criminal, in my opinion.

5. "It's A Marshmallow World", Dean Martin.  "MW" has a curiously cloudy history, so much so that it was difficult to pin down who recorded this first.  That having been said, whether or not it was Frank Sinatra, it was not Dean Martin.  That having been said, and I cannot stress this enough, this is not a Christmas song.  There's no real mention of any winter holiday, and so much like "Jingle Bells", "Frosty the Snowman", and "Winter Wonderland", to name a few, radio stations could continue playing this into February--yet they don't.  Tragic.

6. "What Is Christmas?", Trans-Siberian Orchestra.  I have to tip the ol' visor to a holiday tune with a stanza like "What is Christmas?/Candles everywhere/A fire hazard/Any other day".  The point made slightly earlier on, that Christmas may just be "an ex-cuse to tolerate snow", is also worthy.

7. "Christmas Dragnet", Stan Freberg.  This one is a particularly timely and poignant entry, coming as it done on the heels of Harry Morgan's death Wednesday.  As a Freberg tune/sketch, it falls somewhat uncomfortably in between "St. George and the Dragonet" and "Green Chri$tma$", combining the features of each without quite rising to the level of either.  But since Joe Friday is more on our minds this week than usual, and since the piece is not by any stretch awful, here it is.

8. "7:00 News/Silent Night", Simon & Garfunkel.  Third (and final) on the list of worthy remakes, this is one that could easily be remade again--all you'd need to do is record a new news track to be read over the tune.  This could be a (depressing) annual tradition.  That of course, is only sort of a good thing.

I am reminded, in considering this track, of WLS-Chicago's Holiday Festival of Music, which was noted for tracking Christmas preparations and explaining holiday traditions at the top of each hour in and around holiday tunes during the countdown to midnight on 24/5 December.  In the midnight segment, there's an extended piece which includes a poll-taker asking people what their favorite Christmas song is, and "SN" heads the list--by design, of course, because the aircheck leads into a version of the song.  Nonetheless, I'm not sure that that would really win an open poll.  I suspect its popularity on that piece is more a matter of "I must think of some Christmas song quickly...um...Silent Night!" than any real preference for the tune.

And while it would be nice to have this one end the collection, you can't go out on a track that closes by talking about 5 more years of war in Vietnam, so...

9. "Christmas In Heaven", Monty Python.  This one makes the cut in part because it provides a tenuous connection between another very non-Christmas song and Christmas.  One of the very non-Christmas songs that still manage to slip in to "all-Christmas, all-the-time" radio playlists is "My Favorite Things", from The Sound of Music.  I can't explain it, and certainly won't try.  The closest connection between that tune and any winter holiday is found in a passage from this song: "It's Christmas is heaven/There's great films on TV/The Sound of Music twice an hour/And Jaws 1, 2, and 3".

I doubt that that's the reason why we hear this song in December (and in no other months of the year), but I suspect it's the best explanation we're going to get.  And it's still not a holiday tune.

Over at xkcd, there's a slightly different take on holiday music today which makes some of the same points I've been hinting at for the past 7+ years:

 

 Io Saturnalia!

M-->

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28 November 02010 (Happy 22^nd!): ACME-7--An Attempt To Be Part Of The Solution

Usually, I'm part of the problem.  For no apparent reason, it's gotten into me to try being constructive with the annual Christmas music entry.

My railings against abuses of the musical scale at this time of year have been an annual tradition here at The Markives.  For a change, I have compiled a track list of holiday songs worthy of more attention than they typically get in the clutter of pointless remakes that typifies Christmas music.  A couple of ground rules:

1. No remakes.  Obviously.  Sampling, as is sort of done in track 9, gets in just under the cut line.
2. Along the same line: No pseudo-operatic bellowing.  This probably doesn't cut out anything that rule 1 lets through, but better safe than sorry.
3. It's me, so there's going to be comedy on this list.  While parodies are eligible for consideration, there will be no parodies of "The 12 Days of Christmas" here.  Not that they're all bad, but too many of them run out of good ideas around Day 8.  Examples inlcude Frank Welker and the Bob Rivers Comedy Corp.  Exceptions include Allan Sherman and Jeff Foxworthy--neither of whom feel compelled to repeat the entire list all that often.  This matters.  For an example of a non-comedy parody that does it right, check out the version by the Canadian Brass.

On to the music!

1. "Christmas In The Caribbean", Jimmy Buffett.  This one came up recently on Sirius/XM's "Holly" channel--I found it while channel-surfing--and got me started thinking about compiling this set of tunes.  Pretty much remake-proof, as it's hard to imagine this song sounding anywhere near as authentic in anyone else's hands.  Not that lack of authenticity stops some remakers, of course--but I can't see this one ever appearing on, say, a Björk Christmas album.

2. "Deck The Stills", Barenaked Ladies.  Since we're already having fun with the first track, this is a good place to ramp up the levity.  DTS is simply a repeated recitation of the name of the band Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young to the tune of "Deck the Halls", and just silly enough to dodge the "remake" bullet.  For those of you inspired to try this at home, it runs one verse, and you close out on "Crosby" if you've done it correctly.

3. "Must Have Been Old Santa Claus", Harry Connick, Jr.  The humor level drops off, but the fun continues.  Harry C., of course, remains free to remake "Mistletoe and Holly" as he may wish with my preapproval (The Markives, 4 December 02005), which should mean exactly nothing to him.

4. "Kill A Tree For Christ", Celtic Elvis.  Nowhere is the tension inherent in the secular/religious duality of the holiday explored so well as in this number.  In light of her frequent annual declaration that she wasn't sure what possessed people to cut down a tree and bring it into the house in mid-December, I think even Mom might appreciate this one.

5. "Old City Bar", Trans-Siberian Orchestra.  Dipping into TSO's work for the first of two* selections, we have this overlooked gem.  One of the more annoying subgenres of bad Christmas television is  "curmudgeon (of any age, from 6 to 600) discovers the 'true meaning' of Christmas, and maudlin-ness ensues".  Frequently this programming includes bad remakes of holiday tunes.  Leaving out the fact that the "true meaning" of Christmas is a pagan ritual celebrating the winter solstice, thus calling the legitimacy of that whole enterprise into question, OCB does neither.  There may be some discovery--the lyric "For the rest of the night/No one paid for a drink." suggests that--but it is far from maudlin.  It's enough to forgive the songwriter for setting this piece in New York City for no apparent reason.  Even in live performance, the presentation focuses--astonishingly--on the music, not the drama.

6. "Same Old Lang Syne", Dan Fogelberg.  Track 5 takes place on Christmas Eve, and Track 7 will reference New Year's Day briefly, so let's venture up the calendar a little for this one, which facilitates the transition by doing both.  For better or worse, given his December 02007 death, this is probably the song that Dan F. will be best remembered for.  He had a fine sense of humor and loved abusing the English language, so slotting him before Weird Al seems like a good fit.  The song is set on Christmas Eve and uses a chunk of ALS in the closing, which makes it just fine for the holidays in my opinion.

7. "Christmas At Ground Zero", Weird Al Yankovic.  This song gets less attention now than the little it did before 11 September 02001, which may be the result of some folks pushing the sensitivity lever too far.  Celebrating Christmas during a nuclear attack is just the right kind of crazy for my tastes.  This record deserves better.  "The Night Santa Went Crazy" doesn't rise to the level of this one, alhtough it's been getting more attention since "Zero" has slipped in these politically senstive times.

8. "A Lonely Jew On Christmas", Kyle Broflovski.  In perusing the South Park holiday oeuvre, and in desiring to maintain a minimum standard of decency (this list does, after all, appear in close proximity to Natalie's picture), the field is rapidly narrowed to this.**  It continues the thread of recognizing other winter holidays as well.

9. "Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24", Trans-Siberian Orchestra.  One more from TSO.  I'm a bigger fan of this assault on punctuation than I am of their other radio-friendly tune, "Christmas Canon", and while "Wizards In Winter" is another fine instrumental, it's not as clearly a Christmas record.  This is probably my favorite non-comedy Christmas song, in no small part because it holds up outside the context of the story running through the Christmas Eve and Other Stories album.

10. "Can't Wish You A Merry Christmas", Capitol Steps.  Most of the Steps' holiday tunes, like most political satire, have a very short shelf life--we're not going to be singing "Now CBS Has Letterman" much now that the late-night battle of 01992 is over.  (Too bad, actually--that one's kind of a fun song.)  This one is quick (less than a minute), still relevant today, and name-checks the ACLU.  A triple play, and a fine way to close this imaginary album.

Io Saturnalia!

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*--I might also have picked "Ornament" by TSO (I find it interesting that there aren't more Xmas songs with "ornament" in the title), but two out of ten from one artist already seemed to be pushing the limit.
**-- I did consider Christmas Time In Hell as well as the Santa-Claus-and-Jesus-as-lounge-singers medley, but the former loses too much without the video and the latter is all about remakes.  Right down to Rio.