A Christmas mixtape
Some favorite holiday music, books, and movies
Hey y’all,
The truth is: I’m not sure I even like Christmas, but I try to get into the spirit anyways.
To finish up the second year of my monthly “tape over” mixtapes project, I’ve made a holiday mix called Home For Christmas. You can listen to it on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.
I bought a sealed cassette copy of the O’Jays’ Home For Christmas for 99 cents, taped over the protection tabs, taped over the pre-recorded music, and taped over the album art.
These are the songs I want to hear at Christmas: a mix of jazz, soul, doo-wop, and R&B. The mix ends with my very favorite Christmas song: Chuck Berry’s “Merry Christmas, Baby.” It sounds exactly how I want to feel at the end of Christmas Day: mellow and full of gratitude.
It’s very hard to fill a cassette perfectly, so I used snippets of Louis Armstrong’s reading of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” to plug up the gaps at the end of each side.
This is just an itty bitty 45 minutes of music. Lots of favorites didn’t make it. (For example, I have a particular fondness for Christmas reggae!)
If you dig this stuff, you’ll love Walter Martin’s trio of more expansive playlists — Tinsel & Lights (“glittery, sweet, and appropriately childish”), Ultimate Sentimental Holiday Playlist (“dreamy and sad”), and Classical Christmas Cornucopia (“a little holiness”). (Walter and I both love the Savoy Christmas blues album that features the great Charlie Parker and Dan Grissom tracks I featured on my mix.)
You should also check out Matthew Perpetua’s 7 holiday playlists for different types of holiday cheer. (I particularly like Jazzy Christmas, Baby.)
If I want to listen to an album of Christmas music, I love Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas and A Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records. (The latter was covered in a Tuesday Trio). At least once every Christmas — usually a few drinks in — I’ll put on Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart.
On to Christmas books: I adore the Roger Duvoisin version of The Night Before Christmas.
I like to read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol every couple of years. (The actual title is A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being A Ghost Story of Christmas, and is just one of the Christmas ghost stories Dickens wrote.)
The cartoonist Seth has illustrated a series of Christmas ghost stories that I’ve been saving to read on Christmas Eve when the kids are a little older. This year might be the one.
There is a glorious scene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace that depicts Christmas at the Rostov house, complete with a costume party and a sleigh ride. I might re-read it next year.
As for Christmas movies, there are two categories: movies for watching with the kids, and movies for after the kids go to bed.
With the kids (10 & 13): Elf, Home Alone, Gremlins, How The Grinch Stole Christmas, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, A Christmas Story, A Muppet Family Christmas (my wife’s favorite), and A Charlie Brown Christmas. Sometimes we’ll throw A Claymation Christmas Celebration in there, just for me.
After the kids go to bed, I love black and white, somewhat darker, screwball-adjacent stuff like Christmas in Connecticut, The Thin Man, and, most recently, The Man Who Came to Dinner.
When I’m feeling my darkest, I put on Bad Santa.
It seems historically significant to me, somehow, that these 2003 Christmas classics came out in the same year. Elf is fun for the whole family, while Bad Santa is about as family-unfriendly as it gets. They represent the light and dark of Christmas. Buddy the Elf is innocent, unrelentingly upbeat, and optimistic, while Willie Stokes is fallen, rotting away, but not unredeemable. (Fun fact: the Coen Brothers came up for the concept of Bad Santa, and Terry Zwigoff turned down Elf to direct it.)
I feel them both in me — the light and the dark — and they both have their time and place.
Alright, back to trying to enter into the spirit. Would love to hear from you — your holiday favorites or your holiday hates — in the comments:
xoxo,
Austin
We watched Emmett Otter’s Jug Band Christmas every year when I was a kid and I still watch it to this day. If your wife loves the Muppets, she will love this. Jim Henson at his earliest and his best, and the music is phenomenal.
WXPN here in Philly does 24 hours of holiday music starting at midnight on the 24th. The DJ, Robert Drake, has been doing it for years and really loves it -- it's worth tuning in throughout the day to see what he's dug up.
Also, the single greatest Christmas song of all time is version of O Holy Night that appears on A Creole Christmas, performed by Irma Thomas. Her other versions of it are beautiful; this one is the most transcendent, moving song I've ever heard. Just thinking about it makes me well up.