New Socks for Christmas

That’s the name of this year’s Christmas disc, the first to benefit from the ease and availability of the Apple Music Store. I like a mix of semi-traditional songs and wild stuff, and I’m perfectly willing to accept songs that are only marginally about Christmas — in fact, this year’s disc started with three Weakerthans songs that just had the word Christmas in them, but I thought better of it. Last year’s disc was severely delayed by my desperate, crazy search for Marshall Crenshaw’s “Sock It To Me Santa,” without which there seemed to be no point to burning a disc. This year’s was less driven by a specific find. My only new disc was Los Straitjackets’ christmas disc, which completely kicks ass and stands on its own (including an excellent tribute to The Ventures’ Christmas songs, which inexplicably wound hits of the day into Christmas songs, so that “Drive My Car” becomes “Jingle Bells”. Los Straitjackets do the same, winding The Ventures’ “Walk Don’t Run” into “Sleigh Ride” — brilliant!) And in fact I was going to make it very brief (let’s face it, there’s not a lot of good new songs every year), but I found a nice set of additions to my collection in the Apple Music Store, and so the tradition of a new CD for Christmas is preserved. Here’s this year’s playlist:

• Surfin’ Santa &#47 The Surfaris
  
• Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer Mambo &#47 Billy May
  
• Sleigh Ride &#47 Los Straitjackets
  
• Soulful Christmas &#47 James Brown
  
• Merry Christmas Emily &#47 Cracker
  
• The Christians And The Pagans &#47 Dar Williams
  
• Hark, the Herald Angels Sing &#47 Vince Guaraldi
  
• It Came Upon Midnight Clear &#47 Sixpence None The Richer
  
• Rudy &#47 The Be Good Tanyas
  
• Silent Night All Day Long &#47 John Prine
  
• Blue Christmas &#47 Willie Nelson
  
• Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer &#47 Jewel
  
• Frosty the Snowman &#47 Fiona Apple
  
• Please Come Home for Christmas &#47 Willie Nelson
  
• Christmastime &#47 Aimee Mann and Michael Penn
  
• God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen &#47 Los Straitjackets
  
• Silver Bells &#47 John Prine
  
• Family Christmas &#47 Lizzie West
  
• Christmas Time Is Here &#47 Vince Guaraldi

I didn’t do a great job of capturing The Nutcracker on digital film, but thank you for asking, a couple pictures of my perfect daughters doing their parts are here.