It’s no secret – I love Christmas. The snow (should we be so lucky), the lights, warm alcoholic beverages, pine scents, tolerable members of your family. Should there be such a thing.
Christmas is about tradition, a precarious sentiment when you’re a queer in a season synonymous with Macy’s, normative family values and corporate capitalism. Should we embrace the holidays or deride them, forging new territory with a separatist’s zeal? I’ve always opted for the former. Sorry. But it doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with the normative.
So in the spirit of juggling the conventional with the peculiar, naff or unlikely, I’ve assembled a pedigree of my favorite “Christmas classics” for your seasonal enjoyment, ranging from the obvious (Mimi) to the self promotional (me) in what is, for the most part, an unironic playlist.
1. The Christmas Song – Peggy Lee
This is perhaps the most traditional tune here. Recorded in 1960, it really spins the sensation of warmth and coziness found in suburban fortitude, which was the way of the era.
2. Santa Baby – Kylie Minogue
A few years back, when Kylie was trying to break into the American market for a zillionth time, she thought that the best route was to light up that Rockefeller tree and put out a holiday “EP” (2 songs) – though this recording had been floating around for years. Gotta love this budget video. Is that Kylie or Amanda? We’ll never know…
3. Frosty the Snowman – Cocteau Twins
Christmas Classic. Next.
4. It Doesn’t Often Snow at Christmas – Pet Shop Boys
This was a nail in the coffin of the Boys 27 year record contract with Parlaphone. Instead of releasing “All Over The World” as the lead single to their 2009 “Yes,” the label was like, “let’s slow the song down, throw on some french horns and toss out a christmas EP.” So they dusted off this track, which was once but a 90s fanclub Christmas card trifle, for what became the Boys’ poorest charting release to date. Watch out for the dancing Christmas trees near the song’s crescendo.
5. Winter Wonderland & Sleigh Ride – Dolly Parton & Kenny Rogers
Dolly, serving 80s mall soundtrack realness.
6. Little Drummer Boy (featuring Bobbi Kristina Brown) – Whitney Houston
This is certainly the most bizarre track on Whitney’s midling Christmas effort “One Wish.” “Little Drummer Boy,” featuring her daughter, stacks the chips in her favor, though perhaps not in the most flattering of ways. Bobbi sounds scared. “That’s my baby” – thanks Whitney. The beat never quite congeals as a Christmas groove (for another example of this, see “8 Days of Christmas” by Destiny’s Child). And the absurdity that the “Rrumpa Pum Pum” dissolves into is pure bliss. Well done everyone.
7 + 8. Like a Snowman / Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas – Tracey Thorn
Time to get RUL earnest. Tinsel and Lights is a beautiful, if somewhat bleak, Christmas record from Everything But the Girl vocalist Tracey Thorn. I have it as a record. Which helps with the retro seasonal feel of it. “Like a Snowman” was written by that lovable little grinch Stephin Merrit for that lovably drunken chanteuse – Kiki, of Kiki and Herb (yeah yeah… Justin Vivian Bond). Tracey doesn’t layer the tune with any form of humor, and that approach works, too! Double that with Tracey’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and, well, as my Dirty Looks collaborators put it last year at our Holiday party (wherein I made them build Ikea furniture), “turn this shit off! It’s depressing!” One man’s beauty…
9 + 10. White Christmas / Marshmallow World – Darlene Love
Basically you could just play the entire “A Christmas Gift For You from Phil Spector” because it’s the best Christmas album ever recorded. I blatantly ripped off this innovative structuring of “White Christmas” for my Christmas single last year (see below) and “Marshmallow World” is one of those attempts at creating a new Christmas standard that didn’t stick. Bing Crosby and Sinatra did their best to bring it into the canon. I think Darlene wore it best tho. Also, I love marshmallows.
11. Sleigh Ride – The Ronettes
See above. Although I did neglected to mention Spector’s fabulously creepy “Silent Night” spoken outro / thank-you list at the record’s end.
12. Driving Home For Christmas – Saint Etienne
A quite lovely rendition of a little-known Christmas tune that originally appeared on Saint Etienne’s 1995 Fan Club Christmas record. It was recycled when the band appealed to that same (if somewhat diminished) fanbase 16 years later for their holiday record/compilation, “A Glimpse of Stocking.”
13. Silent Night – Stevie Nicks
Cause, well, Stevie goes with everything. Obviously.
14 + 15. Oh Santa! / All I Want For Christmas Is You – Mariah Carey
Clearly Christmas belongs to Mariah Carey. Time will tell if “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is destined to become “Marshmallow World” in the eyes of the children that we will never have, but presently, it’s about as Christmas as Christ. And, I must say, with the release of Merry Christmas II You (great holiday sequel title, Mimi!), “Oh Santa” was a damn good attempt at conjuring a follow-up hit. Naturally, you can kind of only shoulder one holiday classic in your career, but if anyone can beat the odds, it’s certainly Mariah. I’ve replaced the original “All I Want…” video here with the totally creepy video she did for Justin Bieber’s “holiday” album last year. Just post pregnancy, I love how Mariah essentially plants herself against a wall while Beebs tears about Macy’s, plugging the products that afforded her appearance. Also note, they’re singing the song to one another. Ew.
16. Little Drummer Boy (feat. Busta Rhymes) – Justin Bieber
Speaking of Bieber, John Waters endorsed this rap take on the “classic track” (why is Little Drummer Boy the messy bottom of Christmas songs) causing me to give the track a close listen. And it is deliriously stupid. Busta rhyming “egg nog with a sprinkle of vanilla” with “Chinchilla,” before delivering the closing blow “People everywhere, all my twitter followers, Merry Christmas, Kwanzaa and Happy Chanukah.” And Biebs rapping. “Glow. glow. glow.”
17. Merry Xmas Says Your Text Message – Dragonette
So this Dragonette stab at Christmas digital download sales may be a little tacky (they’re Canadian), but it’s a nice empowering anti-Christmas song about feelings in the digital communication age. The holidays can be a terrifically polarizing time, emotionally speaking. Who hasn’t wanted to send that text at one point or another?
18. Anorak Christmas – Sally Shapiro
Nothing screams Christmas, or, you know, the joy of life, quite like the fragile pipes on Sally Shapiro. Her/their debut Italo Disco album, Disco Romance, 2007 could really just be considered a contempo Christmas record, brimming, as it is, with wintry love songs – “Skating in the Moonshine” or “Jackie Jackie (Spend This Winter With Me)” – but this cover of a song by the Nixons that no one had ever heard before came out right when the blogosphere fever pitch around Shapiro was at its peak. It sealed the deal on the fervor around this stargazing duo. Their signature combo on “Anorak Christmas” of Christmas synths and that surging Italo beat counters Shapiro’s gloriously shy and awkward Swedish delivery of amorous lines like, “The first time that I saw your face on a cold December night / It was a Tuesday on a gig of a band that we both like… I want to kiss you / I need to kiss you- oooo” By the time you reach the post-meeting confession, “there are no words in any language for feelings just like this” you’re more than quite inclined to agree, with dear Sally. See also the wonderful Anoraak Xmas remix and the gloriously seasonal and sparse “Piano Mix,” which finds musical backbone Johan Agebjörn festively plunking away at an electric piano.
19. Merry Christmas Darling – The Carpenters
If there’s anything more Christmas than Mariah Carey, it’s The Carpenters. Like Mariah, they have 2 Christmas records under their belt. “Merry Christmas Darling” started the trend. Released between their behemoth hits “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “For All We Know” at the peak of their career, the song has a sound that is both distinctly Carpenters and Christmas. I suppose the branding in either camp is rather similar. Still this tune is one of my lasting and most favorite non-traditional Christmas songs. Like Thorn’s songs above, it’s rather melancholy, but so is the holiday if you think of it (ghosts of Christmas past, you can’t always get what you want, etc. etc.). I think it popped up on Glee recently. But I don’t watch that show.
20. White Christmas – Mary Boom!
In the spirit of taking as well as giving, last year, I tried my hand at creating a Christmas classic. This “promotional video” for my “Christmas Special,” Merry Christmas Mary Boom! goes where no self-respecting Christmas song should: the dancefloor. Specifically, a 90s, acid-house dance floor. Maybe somewhere in Detroit. Shout out to my fly girls Monica Yi and Colin Self.
(Special Bonus Track!) Santa Baby – Dynasty Handbag
At said Christmas Special, (which can be watched here, here , and here many amazing holiday renditions were performed – Justin Vivian Bond sang the original, macabre lyrics to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” Geo Wyeth dirged his way through “Little Drummer Boy” (that poor song, again), Nicholas Gorham and Dane Terry went pacific with “Mele Kalikimaka,” Colby Keller even invented a new Christmas carol – Danny the Big Dicked Boner Boy. I don’t play favorites, but my favorite was Dynasty Handbag’s rendition of “Santa Baby,” which strips the song of any subtext, whatsoever, spewing an incoherent blather of greed, infantilism, female objectification, daddy complexes and a rather poignantly placed Santa hat in the name of “Downtown Performance.” “I need some money! Give me money! I need a daddy! Waaaaahh”
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