Nika

Our cat finds bags entertaining. We find her entertaining.

The edge of surfeit

In past years I used to occasionally interrupt my attempts at Christmas shopping by going into a record store and picking up a new seasonal tape or CD. You know: "Oh look, so-and-so has a Christmas album, I wonder if it's any good, it'd be nice to have some more of that stuff to listen to at this time of year." These years I do it at the iTunes store. One advantage is that you can hear a little sample first.

Most of it disappoints. You understand, all I ask for is a few good songs per album, but even so it's a crap shoot. There was the Roches' collection We Three Kings: They sounded like they were making fun of both the music and themselves in every song. Forget it.* And Linda Ronstadt's A Merry Little Christmas: Well, maybe I should have seen that one coming; she's got a way of coating a song in sugary sentiment anyway, and then you put that on top of Christmas and it crosses some horrible threshold ... It's like holiday food. You take for granted that you'll be eating more sugar and more fat than usual, but even so there are moments when it's just too much, even for a guy like me.

That line between "What a delicious holiday treat!" and "Help, I can't stand it! Get this away from me!" is a fine line, and of course it depends on the beholder and on the beholder's mood. Bette Midler made an album called Cool Yule. I have had it for a few years. I had been remembering it as almost in the Ronstadt category, but I listened to it right through yesterday and almost none of it had seriously ill effects. There are a couple of songs there that I'm not sure I would ever want to hear again. And I'm not saying I want to hear her special Christmas version of Nanci Griffith's From a Distance more than, say, three or four times in the season; it resembles an apple pie covered with butter frosting, and it's got incongruous bits of other songs stuck in it like sugarplums. But I'm glad it's there. Her Mele Kalikimaka is perfectly fine, although I can't help hearing it as a slightly pale imitation of the Bing Crosby version. In the case of that song, if you're not going to depart further than that from the canonical version, what's the point? The same applies to I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm; in this case it's the Dean Martin version that is the reindeer in the room. But I'm really liking her I'll be Home for Christmas and What Are You Doing New Year's Eve? They're neither better nor worse than, respectively, Bing's and Ella's: a bit heavily frosted, but yummy.

In the course of singing a duet with Johnny Mathis, a medley of Winter Wonderland and Let it Snow, Bette calls Mathis "The King of Christmas". Which led me to check out his Christmas stuff. Well, it may be too soon to say, but so far I'm disappointed. Maybe I need to get used to the pace, which is slow, and to that weird way he has of sliding up or down on a note as he modulates to a new key. In any case, it's not a total loss. For one thing, his Sleigh Ride is a keeper. For another, he includes (between two verses!) that intro to WW. At last I have the tune! Oh, and I'm putting his Chestnuts in with all those others (and taking out a couple -- the Crosby/Sinatra and the Brubeck).

* One bright spot: They sing the intro of Winter Wonderland ("Over the ground lies a blanket of white, ... Two hearts are thrilling, in spite of the chilling weather  ..."), which I never knew before. I was happy to find it, but frustrated by the fact that they do it in a kind of three-part harmony that leaves me wondering which of the three parts is the melody.

All chestnuts, all the time

Well, I did it. I listened to all thirteen renditions of Chestnuts. No regrets, but possibly there are one or two that I never need to hear again.

You wouldn't think that a chorus could really do justice to this song, and you'd probably be right. But it's not that simple: the Mitch Miller version and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir version are really very different. I prefer the latter, though I'll use it sparingly.

It occurs to me that it is not possible to record a version of this song without making implicit reference to the Nat King Cole version. (I am thinking of Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote".) For example, if you don't sing "Merry Christ-ma-has" at the end, that's a statement in itself.

Carols

In  The Oxford Book of Carols  there is a footnote to "Good King Wenceslas". It begins

This rather confused narrative owes its popularity to the delightful tune, which is that of a Spring carol, "Tempus adest floridum", No. 99. Unfortunately Neale in 1853 substituted for the Spring carol this 'Good King Wenceslas', one of his less happy pieces, which E. Duncan goes so far as to call 'doggerel', and Bullen condemns as 'poor and commonplace to the last degree'.

Bing

Bing Crosby's album "White Christmas" has twelve songs. These years only about four of them get on my short list of seasonal music.

My favorite thing about Bing's style is the way he dances around the beat: a phrase will have an out-of-rhythm experience to the point where it seems to be getting lost, and then the next thing you know it's home safe and sound, like a ghost returning to its body or a plane to its aircraft carrier.

The second- and third-worst songs, in some order, are "Adeste Fideles" -- Latin with unapologetically American vowels ("A-des-tay Fee-day-lace") -- and the deeply hokey "Christmas in Killarney".

The absolute worst is "Faith of Our Fathers", the only one where Crosby's deliberate rhythmic looseness seems misplaced. He's doing it against a background of choral singing -- and in my opinion pretty lame choral singing and badly recorded at that.

Three of the best are those in which Bing is joined by the Andrews Sisters: "Jingle Bells", "Santa Claus is Coming to Town", and "Mele Kalikimaka"*. The sisters' tightly rhythmic self-contained harmonizing is just what Bing's loosey-goosey crooning needs, and vice versa. Each style enhances the other.

My other favorite is his heartfelt version of "I'll be home for Christmas". (Incidentally, this is what is playing in Nathaniel Fisher's new hearse at the big bad moment in the pilot episode of Six Feet Under.) This season I've been listening to Tony Bennett's cool and breezy version of the same song, but at this point I'm about ready to go back to Bing.

* This is deeply hokey, too, but in a good way.

It's like an advent calendar, isn't it?

A once a day thing, I mean. My last post was at 11:58 pm on December 2 (in my time zone), and now it's December 3. Maybe I will write about a different Christmas song every day for weeks. Probably not, though.

All I want to say now, before going to bed, is something about "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas": There are some variations in the lyrics. I grew up hearing "Hang a shining star upon the highest bough" at the high point in the final stanza. I was happy to find the alternative "Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow" in the Ella Fitzgerald rendition, and even happier to discover later on that this meatier and more melancholy version of the song was the authentic one from "Meet me in St. Louis". It turns out that the bowdlerized "shining star"version was created especially for Frank Sinatra, who wanted to record the song but needed it to be injected with holiday cheer first. But the kicker is that the good sad version is itself a toned-down version of the songwriter's original truly grim creation, which began:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last ...

Judy Garland refused to sing it that way.

'Tis the Season

I get a little obsessed with Christmas songs at this time of year. Partly for my daughter's sake but mostly for my own, I load up my iPod with that stuff so that I can play it in the car.

I mean "Christmas songs" in a broad sense. But I do have a slight obsession with "The Christmas Song" itself, informally known as "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire". I guess the guys who wrote it, Mel ("The Golden Fog") Tormé and Bob Wells, were pretty lucky that that title wasn't already taken. They wrote the song in 1944 or 1945, depending which Wikipedia article you believe. Tormé said that they wrote the song while just hanging out one summer day: they began spouting wintry phrases as a way of taking their minds off the heat, and it somehow turned into a song. A year ago I got a little more obsessed than usual with that song, and now I have 13 versions of it in my laptop. Most of them are lousy, so I have only put three of them in the iPod right now, but probably before the season is over I will go on a binge and listen to all 13 of them one day on the way to work. My three favorites are:

(1) Ella Fitzgerald's. Like the rest of the album "Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas", this wears well. I could listen to it every day for a month.

(2) The instrumental version by Vince Guaraldi, on the soundtrack of the Charlie Brown Christmas special.

(3) Aaron Neville's. Not quite as durable as Ella's, and not for everyone, but I could listen to it every two days for a month.

The ones that I don't like so much include one by Stevie Wonder that's uninspired and, I don't know, lame. There's also one by Dave Brubeck that's part of a whole album that's just no fun. And, come to think of it, the definitive Nat King Cole version just doesn't do it for me any more.