The first of my annual Wholly Trinity, updated
Robin likes to celebrate the season by putting way too many Christmas songs on rotation. In fact, he has a more truncated version of his collection on his iPhone which we played on the way back from visiting Mom last Saturday. As I've mentioned before, I didn't do Christmas as a kid because duh, I grew up Jewish. But as I got older and aspects of the season became more and more secularized, and as I recognized their origins (like those of so many Christian-co-opted celebrations) were pagan anyway and a response to the natural rhythms of nature (with Christmas it’s the winter solstice and a celebration that the days are going to start getting longer again and until then we need to bring as much light into the world as possible, literally and figuratively, wich is a lovely thought), I started adopting a more inclusive attitude. Besides, what's so funny about peace, love and understanding? So during my first marriage, my personal rituals grew to encompass collecting the Rankin/Bass and other holiday cartoons by videotaping them off the TV when they came 'round, as well as our annual reading of Dickens "A Christmas Carol," about which I've blogged elsewhere. (If you want to do the same, as I mentioned in that entry and which I'd highly recommend, you can check out this website for the full text.) But while Robin has a certain limited patience for my cooing "Oh cool, the Alistair Sim version is on!", he doesn't want to know from the animated Rudolph and Hermie - his interests lie more in the audio realm.
So it is I've found myself treated to Christmas songs I'd never heard before, or never really paid attention to, when I was younger. I know most of the sacred ones from having been in a college choral group, where you can't really escape them no matter how loud you protest (I'm my mother's daughter; back in the '60s she spearheaded successful efforts to expand my elementary school holiday singalong program beyond solely the Christian POV), and of course the rock-oriented ones from them being on the radio back when I was a voracious listener (roughly the '70s through the mid-'80s). But there are a lot of obscure, eclectic and/or British ones I didn't know until Robin started playing them, and now they're among my favorites. For instance, he's currently playing something by Tori Amos (or as he says, "Neil Gaiman's friend") that I'm sure he's played before but I forget from year to year. I think I might have known songs like 2000 Miles before but didn't really pay attention to their beauty as much before the Annual Change of Rotation as Robin reshuffles and reprograms the CD players just about annually, queueing up the 20+ compilations in his collection.
I count "Fairytale of New York" among my favorites 'cause it's just, you know, so goofy and scruffy-boy and real. In one remake, in the verse where they're insulting each other? – the producers decided to bleep "slut" and replace the line "you cheap lousy faggot" with "you're cheap and you're haggard." [As a digression, that is the definition of "politically correct," that much-misused phrase that right-wingers and ignorant message board posters all seem to think means something like "people out to destroy tradition by opining that folks should be more inclusive and nicer to each other, the spoilsports," but which actually originates with the left and means (or used to mean) nothing more than "gee, we like these folks and they're well-meaning and all but this is all just a little anal-retentive, don't you think?"] I think "cleaning up" the lyrics of a song where the participants deliberately insult each other for comedic and dramatic effect because you don't want to use a purposely-derogatory phrase like "slut" or "faggot" is as bad as changing “Imagine’s” lyric “and no religions too” to “and all religion’s true” because you can’t deal with the concept of atheism as a thought exercise. It completely misses the point of the song.
Other preferred holiday songs include Pretenders’ “2000 Miles” (obviously, hence the title of this piece), Jethro Tull’s “Ring Out Solstice Bells,” and Greg Lake’s "I Believe in Father Christmas", which is also Robin’s favorite. Oddly, I’ve yet to hear a song from this century that grabs me in the way the ones from a quarter century ago (or more) did. I suspect part of the reason may be the advent of Auto-Tune, which not only grates on me like fingernails on a blackboard but which seems to drown out holiday-like sounds like sleigh bells. I’m sure The Next Great Holiday Standard will come out any day now, and I’m trying to keep an open mind and ear, but I’m afraid I’m always going to gravitate towards musicals and Robin’s playlist.
Robin likes to celebrate the season by putting way too many Christmas songs on rotation. In fact, he has a more truncated version of his collection on his iPhone which we played on the way back from visiting Mom last Saturday. As I've mentioned before, I didn't do Christmas as a kid because duh, I grew up Jewish. But as I got older and aspects of the season became more and more secularized, and as I recognized their origins (like those of so many Christian-co-opted celebrations) were pagan anyway and a response to the natural rhythms of nature (with Christmas it’s the winter solstice and a celebration that the days are going to start getting longer again and until then we need to bring as much light into the world as possible, literally and figuratively, wich is a lovely thought), I started adopting a more inclusive attitude. Besides, what's so funny about peace, love and understanding? So during my first marriage, my personal rituals grew to encompass collecting the Rankin/Bass and other holiday cartoons by videotaping them off the TV when they came 'round, as well as our annual reading of Dickens "A Christmas Carol," about which I've blogged elsewhere. (If you want to do the same, as I mentioned in that entry and which I'd highly recommend, you can check out this website for the full text.) But while Robin has a certain limited patience for my cooing "Oh cool, the Alistair Sim version is on!", he doesn't want to know from the animated Rudolph and Hermie - his interests lie more in the audio realm.
So it is I've found myself treated to Christmas songs I'd never heard before, or never really paid attention to, when I was younger. I know most of the sacred ones from having been in a college choral group, where you can't really escape them no matter how loud you protest (I'm my mother's daughter; back in the '60s she spearheaded successful efforts to expand my elementary school holiday singalong program beyond solely the Christian POV), and of course the rock-oriented ones from them being on the radio back when I was a voracious listener (roughly the '70s through the mid-'80s). But there are a lot of obscure, eclectic and/or British ones I didn't know until Robin started playing them, and now they're among my favorites. For instance, he's currently playing something by Tori Amos (or as he says, "Neil Gaiman's friend") that I'm sure he's played before but I forget from year to year. I think I might have known songs like 2000 Miles before but didn't really pay attention to their beauty as much before the Annual Change of Rotation as Robin reshuffles and reprograms the CD players just about annually, queueing up the 20+ compilations in his collection.
I count "Fairytale of New York" among my favorites 'cause it's just, you know, so goofy and scruffy-boy and real. In one remake, in the verse where they're insulting each other? – the producers decided to bleep "slut" and replace the line "you cheap lousy faggot" with "you're cheap and you're haggard." [As a digression, that is the definition of "politically correct," that much-misused phrase that right-wingers and ignorant message board posters all seem to think means something like "people out to destroy tradition by opining that folks should be more inclusive and nicer to each other, the spoilsports," but which actually originates with the left and means (or used to mean) nothing more than "gee, we like these folks and they're well-meaning and all but this is all just a little anal-retentive, don't you think?"] I think "cleaning up" the lyrics of a song where the participants deliberately insult each other for comedic and dramatic effect because you don't want to use a purposely-derogatory phrase like "slut" or "faggot" is as bad as changing “Imagine’s” lyric “and no religions too” to “and all religion’s true” because you can’t deal with the concept of atheism as a thought exercise. It completely misses the point of the song.
Other preferred holiday songs include Pretenders’ “2000 Miles” (obviously, hence the title of this piece), Jethro Tull’s “Ring Out Solstice Bells,” and Greg Lake’s "I Believe in Father Christmas", which is also Robin’s favorite. Oddly, I’ve yet to hear a song from this century that grabs me in the way the ones from a quarter century ago (or more) did. I suspect part of the reason may be the advent of Auto-Tune, which not only grates on me like fingernails on a blackboard but which seems to drown out holiday-like sounds like sleigh bells. I’m sure The Next Great Holiday Standard will come out any day now, and I’m trying to keep an open mind and ear, but I’m afraid I’m always going to gravitate towards musicals and Robin’s playlist.
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