Winter.
After our eyes experience the blossoming of Spring, our skin the inescapable heat of Summer, and our noses and mouths the World Court punishable assault of Autumn’s pumpkin spice, our ears enjoy the soundtrack of Winter. The silence after a bout of snow, and at the other end, holiday music.
Our official holiday playlist now stands at 4 days and 17 hours long. It has been refined every year, carefully built over decades, migrated through 12 different database configurations, copied to 5 subsequent hard drives. If we begin playing it on a Monday morning, we will nearly make it to Saturday afternoon without repeats. That, is a great deal of merry.
The melodies of winter are my favorite part of the holidays, good or bad, and there are bad ones, you can’t just listen to everything. Seriously, we’ve been curating this list for 30 years; at first it was just a few CDs that we’d burned, then we realized we were missing some individual tracks so we used keywords to search our entire music library.
First we used “Christmas”. Not a lot of surprises there.
Then we searched for “holiday”, a little bit more random because the Madonna song kept coming up.
The word “winter” was good. We do have an album by a man named Paul Winter, but it’s entirely mellow and fits right in.
Proper nouns were not as successful. Santa worked out, but there is no segue between any holiday tune and Johnny Cash’s version of “Personal Jesus”.
There’s barely any reason to carry holiday tunes around this time of year, because they’re everywhere. Where were you when you heard your first one this year? Grocery store? Mine was a bodega down the block, two days after Thanksgiving, they snuck it in after a Billy Joel thing. It was the gateway track, ‘White Christmas’ by The Drifters. Everyone recognized it, eyes rolled a little bit but then our heads started bobbing and we all were very quietly singing along. Then they played ‘Boogie Shoes’ by KC and the Sunshine Band because it wasn’t December just yet.
We bought sleigh bells last year. Honest to goodness sleigh bells. For years we’d shaken our keys, or said just “Ching Ching Ching Ching Ching” which was fine. But I was recording something Christmas-y, and no matter what software combination I used I couldn’t generate or even sample an authentic sleigh bell sound because there’s nothing else that sounds like sleigh bells. Except keys. And saying “Ching Ching Ching Ching Ching” over and over.
Sleigh bells are huge, and you don’t shake them, you hold them with your fist in one hand (they’re pointed down like a bunch of cyber-grapes) and you hit that fist with the other fist. The other way to play them is to have a horse. I have an apartment in Brooklyn. Thus.
So in a world that needs no more holiday music, in a home that also seems to have plenty, I have, in the past, written about a half-clutch of holiday songs – most when I was a corporate boss which I sang at our departmental December gatherings. I wasn’t asked to do this, but I wasn’t asked to stop once I’d started, so every year I’d make up a song about the holidays, careful to sidestep restrictions on trees, candles, and wreaths.
Part of my job was about diversity, so Christmahanasolistwanzaa was born, with carols about all allowable subjects, which were food and bells. Somehow, bells weren’t restricted; they jingled, they were silver, but they weren’t mentioned in any texts of note or apocryphal tales like drums were. Pa rum pa pum pum indeed.
This week I found that recording; as it was made before the kind of digital technology that would allow me to redo it in any way, I was at least allowed to sweeten it at last with the sound of actual sleigh bells. If you’d like to hear it, please click the “play” arrow above; if not, I am totally with ya. Unlike the summer sun, music should not be inescapable.
But if you could use a little ray of audio sunshine, I got you covered.
O, the Bells of Christmahanasolistwanzaa ring ,
wishing all the happiness that wintry fun can bring.
We can all enjoy the happy wintry tale they tell
’cause there isn’t anybody here that don’t like bells.
O, the Bells of Christmahanasolistwanzaa chime,
Echoing the glee that we all feel around this time.
So no matter what tradition that you celebrate
Christmahanasolistwanzaa bells make you feel great.
As we all express excitement at December’s end,
we can share a meal together with a few good friends.
So the Bells of Christmahanasolistwanzaa bong
Just to give us an excuse to sing this little song.
Gifts of Tintinabulation.