So, my theory goes like this :

If I could accidentally collect about 40 Christmas records over the past few years, I must have actively passed up at least a thousand. Perhaps they were duplicates, perhaps they were all fairly generic in their variety or instrumentation, but I’ve always just flipped right past them. Now, I’m the kind of collector that becomes inspired by anything that presents itself in quantity, so I don’t know why they never crossed my mind as ‘collectible’. Thanks again go to FaLaLaLaLa for showing me otherwise. I still think that my repulsion away from Christmas music is a gut reaction to my grandma’s insistence on playing what she calls ‘Japanese jazz’ during many holiday events. You know the music that they played on the Weather Channel in the early 90s? It’s like living inside of that. And praying for some kind of supertornado to just come on by and relieve you from your misery.

Given the amount of holiday music that’s been produced, a very small percentage of it actually finds radio play every year, be it on an FM station or piped into a mall. This means that there are thousands of Christmas songs that are just going unnoticed, forgotten, and ultimately unappreciated. And that idea is what inspires me to discover and collect. By the time I die, I’m going to compile the ultimate Christmas playlist. It will not be encyclopedic, but it’ll undoubtedly be a thousand times more interesting than what we traditionally hear. And it’ll absolutely involve some Twisted Sister. Did you know that Dee Snider wrote a Christmas song that was later recorded by an unwitting Celine Dion?

So, I’ve gotten a good start on my Ultimate Christmas Mix – and given the assortment of records I’ve found in the garage, I’ve also started on The Worst Christmas Mix Ever That Makes Babies Cry.

My personal favorite, for the cover alone, is ‘Home For Christmas : A Joyous Evening of Yuletide Songs’, released in 1964. The joyousness is doubtful, as it appears that this record hasn’t seen a needle more than once, whereas my copy of Led Zeppelin’s ‘IV’ is scratched to heck and back, denoting the true measure of joy derived from any album. The cover depicts a family joylessly singing along to the piano playing of a bespectacled girl, whose pigtail strangely and rigidly extends out from her head. They stand in a line, mouths agape, clearly gathered together for some kind of highly invasive tonsil inspection form the Ghost of Christmas Whatever. The only one even kinda smiling is ol’ Grandma, and she’s only smiling because the baby is about to goose the dog. The gentleman in blue wears a ‘P’ on his chest, which surely stands for ‘Pretty Awesome Guy’. Merry Christmas.

Of note is ‘Good King Wenceslas‘, which has the ‘father’ character belting it out in a crazy, unnatural baritone as if it were some kind of Klingon battle hymn – causing me to giggle uncontrollably, especially at the verse ‘BRING ME FLESH AND BRING ME WINE!’ A finer Klingon there never was!

A close second is Engelbert Humperdinck’s ‘Christmas Tyme’. He doesn’t have to spell thyngs ryght, he’s the Humperdinck! He can spell it wrong fyve different tymes on the record sleeve, but are you gonna argue with that surly lothario on the cover? I didn’t think so. It’s a cover that begs the question, ‘Is this the best photo you could get?’ The answer is ‘yes, Mr. Humperdinck had a very busy schedule of swoonifying women that day.’

The most interesting record of the bunch is ‘A Music Box Christmas’. which is a recording of a collection of 19th century music boxes, all from the collection of Rita Ford – so within this collection of Christmas records of mine, one of the records themselves is a document of a collection. The liner notes (which are always exhaustive, bombastic, and a fun read in themselves) details the general history of music boxes, the authors of the songs contained therein, and talks about the photograph record rendering the interchangeable discs of a music box obsolete, a theme that’s still repeating itself 30 years later as we constantly change musical formats.

And finally, the only full-length Christmas record I ever intentionally bought, ‘Hi-Fi Organ and Chimes and Christmastime’, purchased solely on the virtue of the word ‘hi-fi’. That, and for ten cents.

If you have a favorite holiday album of any era, comment down below, and check out the collection I’ve amassed so far – and enjoy some holiday tunes!

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer from ‘Hi-Fi Organ and Chimes’ LP
Rudolph by Engelbert Humperdinck
Rudolph by The Boston Pops
Rudolph by Gene Autry
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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 1:00 am and is filed under collecting fyi, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.