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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Gotta Collect? Then You Gotta Connect - Join our Collectors’ Community!

Every now and then a collector has questions. We find a piece that we just don’t know enough about and we seek help. A few collectors have contact me here to help them find out more about their unique vintage items, and while I’ve tried, I wasn’t able to tell them anything more. So, I’m going to offer the info and photos here and if you know anything, please post it in the comments section. (Consider your help good karma — you never know when you’ll be in similar need!)

First up, Andrew and his vintage Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer Pencil Box.

Andrew first contacted via my blog post about Rudolph. He wrote, “I assume that it is licensed because on one side of the box, it is marked ‘RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDEER @ R.L.M. ‘. I was told that it is from the 1950s or 60s but I can’t be sure.”

Here are more photos.

If I had to guess, I’d say circa late 40’s early 50’s as the graphics are very much like the original Rudolph (especially the sheet music) and there are no maker marks (or zip code) to make me think it’d be as late as the 60’s. But then I’m not a Rudolph expert (I’m just a decent generalist).

Hopefully, a real Rudolph expert will show up to tell us more.

Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer was born in 1939 as a marketing gimmick. This may surprise you, but the amazing thing is, Rudolph still draws ‘em in.

Rudolph began 67 years ago when the Montgomery Ward company asked one of their writers to come up with a little Christmas story they could give away to shoppers. The department store chain had been buying and giving away coloring books every year, but this year they wanted to save money by creating their own books.

The writer, Robert L. May, created the story of Rudolph inspired in no small part by the story The Ugly Duckling. Because May had been teased as a child for being a small and shy, he was drawn to this type of underdog story and believed other children would be as well.

He was right. In 1939, 2.4 million copies of the Rudolph booklet were given out. Rudolph was very popular; despite wartime paper shortages affecting printing, a total of 6 million copies of Montgomery Ward’s Rudolph were given away by the end of 1946.

After the war there was a great deal of interest in licensing the Rudolph character. Since May had created Rudolph as an employee of the department store chain, Montgomery Ward held the copyright and May saw no royalties.

In 1944 an animated Rudolph was made. This is the short cartoon that was endlessly shown on TV in the 50’s and 60’s. In a rare commercial credit, Max Fleischer (post the closure of his studio) produced this animation for The Jam Handy Organization. (Unlike most Rudolph products this animated film’s copyright wasn’t protected and it fell into the public domain. This is why it is included on many ‘cheap’ videos and DVDs.) This cartoon strictly adhered to May’s original story.

In order to receive any financial gain from his creation, May would need to secure the copyrights to Rudolph. In 1947 May did get those rights and that next year “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (created in 1944 by Max Fleischer) was finally shown in theaters.

However, the biggest success with Rudolph was when songwriter Johnny Marks, May’s brother in law, created the lyrics and melody that we now hear when we think of Rudolph. Mark’s lyrics tell a bit different tale of Rudolph (if you watch the original Fleischer cartoon, you’ll notice the differences).

Originally Mark’s song was turned down by many performers who didn’t want to mess with the long established Santa story. But in 1949 it was recorded by Gene Autry who sold two million copies that year. The song went on to become one of the best-selling songs of all time (second only to “White Christmas”).

It is interesting to note that Mark’s song is the reason we all list Santa’s reindeers’ names incorrectly. In 1822, Clement Clarke Moore gave us Santa’s reindeers’ names. He wrote them in his “An Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas” which is more commonly known today by its opening line, “‘Twas the night before Christmas”. The lines read:

“Now Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on Donder and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now, dash away! dash away! dash away all!”

Notice, the reindeer’s name is Donder, not Donner as Mark’s wrote it. (Now poor Donder is the maligned deer!)

Anyway, back to Rudolph…

In 1964 NBC ran the now traditional holiday TV special that most of us know and love. This stop motion animation with those now-familiar puppets and narrated by Burl Ives was created by Rankin/Bass. Even though it’s been available on video for years, CBS airs it every single year — making it the longest running TV special.

Generation after generation knows this version of Rudolph, which is based on the Mark’s song version of May’s story. This production by Rankin/Bass is now a part of our collective childhoods.

In 1976, a sequel to the Rankin-Bass original special, entitled Rudolph’s Shiny New Year, was produced. And a third, Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July, came in 1979. In 2001, a fourth in the series, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and The Island of Misfit Toys, was made. This last one was created entirely by computer animation as opposed to traditional stop-motion animation — however, care was taken to make the computer-generated characters resemble their original stop-motion counterparts as much as possible. Will more follow? Perhaps… We do love our Rudolph.

So many of us collect Rudolph items. Some of us focus on the vintage originals, as we preserve the history. A few collect items for their connections — to the author, to music or animation history. Others want any reindeer, any reindeer song. Many of us want all the original items from that 1964 TV special as well as the new theme games, ornaments & village & chacter pieces because we remember drinking cocoa with our sister as we both sat in our jammies and we want to hand that tradition down to our own children.

Or maybe it has nothing to do with Christmas. Maybe we just want all the Rudolphs we can get because we too felt like ugly ducklings and hope to become swans in our own right. But whatever our reindeer games, we collect them just the same.