A Zooglobble Holiday

More holiday music guest post-y goodness! Stefan from Zooglobble offers a peek into his Christmas music collection. It speaks of tastefulness, moderation, and finding good CDs stuck to the back of a cereal box. It also speaks of really amazing Christmas music that I didn't even know existed until I read this -- They Might Be Giants' Holidayland. (But this is a big part of why I planned this series of guest posts, so we could all have these kind of discoveries.) Read on.


Christmas gets asked to meet so many -- and conflicting -- expectations that it's really not fair to the holiday. Compare Christmas to, for example, Thanksgiving, a holiday for which everybody's pretty clear why we're celebrating it, and for which we have exactly one themed CD, from Williams-Sonoma, that gets virtually no attention at any point through the year, including Thanksgiving itself. Christmas, on the other hand, is open to so many different interpretations, spiritual, secular, and commercial, that it's no wonder that the number of Christmas CDs seems limitless.

We really like Christmas, but we also work hard to keep Christmas constrained and with some focus on the spiritual meaning of the holiday. One way we do that is by imposing a strict "no-Christmas-music-before-Thanksgiving" rule. My wife actually subscribes to an even smaller timeframe, but I'm happy with a 5- or 6-week window. Of course, Christmas CDs are sort of like kids' CDs in that there are maybe 15-20 songs that everybody knows. And so if you have more than a dozen Christmas CDs, you're likely to have at least 3 versions of a few songs, which gets old pretty quick, even if they're good versions. (Our daughter sings the first two lines of "Hark! The Herald Angel Sings" ad nauseam throughout the season, and then some.) Which is why we don't have a dozen Christmas CDs. We have exactly ten:

1. A Charlie Brown Christmas Original Soundtrack - Vince Guaraldi Trio: A stone-cold classic in both its cartoon and soundtrack form. How can something so secular be so spiritual?

2. Holiday Piano Favorites - Lorie Line and her Pop Chamber Orchestra: Line, who's well-known around the midwest, has a nice collection of religious standards done in, well, pop chamber style. What makes this CD unusual is that we got it off the back of a box of Chex cereal. Definitely the best cereal-related CD we've ever heard.

3. Hawaiian Slack Key Christmas - Various Artists: We really like slack key guitar.

4. Holidayland - They Might Be Giants: Can you say "completist?" We really, really like They Might Be Giants. But unless you are a Christmas song completist, the CD is for fans only.

5. The Carols of Christmas: A Windham Hill Collection - Various Artists: Sometimes you need your Christmas music to be unobtrusive. I'm not sure "unobtrusivity" is a word or a good quality in music, but this CD has it.

6. Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas - Ella Fitzgerald: I don't know -- I got this just after Christmas last year, and given our Christmas music window, I'm only now getting around to listening to it. But it's Ella Fitzgerald -- how can it be bad?

7. Christmas Adagios - Various Artists: Same deal as the Ella CD. I just felt we needed a fairly comprehensive recording of religious standards, soberly recorded...

8. New Orleans Christmas - Putumayo (Various Artists): This CD is being released this month. It strikes me that it will have a different tone than the Adagios CD.

But wait, the eagle-eyed among you say, that's just eight! Yes, you're right. I wanted to draw special attention to two others:

9. December - George Winston: Remember I said we observed a strict time window for Christmas music? Well, this album gets permission to violate it. Now, since the leadoff track is "Thanksgiving," it's not entirely crazy that it gets played at other times of the year. But it's mostly because Winston's spare piano work is so evocative of the winter season that it seems a shame to limit it to the month of December. January's cold, too.

10. Songs for Christmas - Sufjan Stevens: Are there a bunch of banjos? You bet. Are there renditions of Christmas classics? Certainly. But I can already tell that the reason that we'll be
listening to this many Christmases from now is that Stevens isn't afraid to take a shot at creating his own Christmas songs. Only time will tell if any of them are classics, but it doesn't really matter if they're not -- they're different, and amidst the sea of "Silent Nights" and "White Christmases," that's often enough.

The other thing I like about the Stevens CD is the essay by Rick Moody in the liner notes, which by itself is worth the price of the set. I don't want to quote from it here, because the power of the essay comes from its repetitive nature and its reveal in the final paragraph, but it does talk about the power of singing in this season. Most of these CDs I've listed remind our family of the joy that can come from singing. For Christmas is the one time of year in which it's acceptable for people to sing out, and in a family that's trying to sing out more often, it's nice to have others join in.

But wait! A bonus 11th CD!

11. How could I forget The Nutcracker, which I did in the initial draft of this piece? Maybe it's because there are no words, and it's the words that people usually remember about Christmas music. (It's hard to go carolling and sing the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies.) In any case, we have a Naxos version of the complete ballet, which, frankly goes on a bit too long (I'd recommend sticking with a 1-CD highlights disk), but always gets played at this time of year. We dance to it, though we're not quite so graceful as our local ballet.