Tidings of Comfort and Joy

Of course the moment Thanksgiving was over, I pulled out my Christmas music.

(Actually I’ve been playing it occasionally, surreptitiously, for weeks, music I downloaded from Usenet--out-of-print stuff--and my new Revels CDs, "Christmas in an Irish Castle" and "A Celtic Feast in Song." And of course the Holiday Music channel has reappeared on DishNet.)

I grabbed the tape case first, and have been listening to those cassettes this week. The case holds sixty, but I have managed to tuck four more at the top and two on either side and the carrier still zips. I used to have more, but I replaced some of my favorites with CDs when the tape ends started to crumple between seasons, distorting the first songs on the album. These tapes, like my CDs, run the gamut of different styles. In general, I don't care for a lot of pop singers, especially recent ones. I have no Amy Grant or Boyz2Men or Nsync or Wynonna or anything of that ilk. I do have Perry Como and John Denver and Steve and Eydie, etc., but I like to go for the unusual and different and not the fifty-fifth rerecording of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." When Oxford Books in Atlanta closed, for instance, I grabbed a bunch of cassettes recorded in England that recreates "the waits," carolers of old. They sing medieval and 17th century carols. Another album is "Christmas in Europe," with songs like "Still, Still, Still," "Il Le Ne," and "Past Three O'Clock."

The collection is well-represented in New Age instrumentals, Windham Hill, Tony Elman, etc. There are even the amusingly baroque "What if Mozart Wrote...", two albums of Christmas songs done as chamber music. A brass lover, I have the Canadian Brass and other brass albums. I also have colonial/Early American type albums, with the songs done on hammered dulcimer and other period instruments. One of these contains "The Huron Carol," a song I remember hearing frequently as a child which seemed to have later disappeared. It is a song told from Native American point of view of the birth of Jesus--his father is the "Great Manitou," and instead of swaddling clothes he is wrapped in rabbit skin.

It's a funny thing about Christmas music, how it makes you feel so much at home. James isn't much of a Christmas person, but there are still things that scream "Christmas" to him. I grew up on Perry Como singing about the reindeer with the scarlet proboscis, but to James Christmas is Gene Autry singing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," "Up on the Housetop," etc. So I gave him his very own Gene Autry Christmas album last year, to go along with the "Dr. Demento Christmas" CD I bought him the year before. (I have to confess I enjoy most of this one myself! Especially "Christmas Dragnet." I get a fit of the giggles when the "How most folks call 'em 'green onions,' but they're really scallions" bit begins.)