Mixtapemotions

ALL THE LIGHTS ARE SHINING EVERYWHERE. Last Christmas, Stephen Christian recorded his daughter’s favorite Christmas song, releasing it as an Anchor & Braille song. All of those emotions listed above are my feelings about Mariah Carey’s 1994 hit, “21st Century ‘White Christmas.’” Overplayed, overrated, but more contagious than the Omicron variant and extremely meme-able. We can wear our earplugs into stores, we can blast the latest Taylor Swift or Adele albums in our noise-cancelling AirPods Pro, but the infection rate is close to 100% that you will have this song stuck in your head at some point during the holiday season. I was stricken by the bug today when I turned on A Very Tooth & Nail Christmas on Apple Music. Try as I might, Mae’s “Carol of the Bells” or Copeland’s “Do You Hear What I Hear?” and not even Anberlin’s “Baby Please Come Home” stuck in my head as I stepped out for lunch this afternoon. It’s the Christmas season, so I wondered how this song would fit into my playlist this year? I wondered how Christmas music would fit in or if it would, this year. I thought about how un-Christmasy this year feels. And then it struck. The ear-virus didn’t come in the form of Michael Buble, Ariana Grande, or Justin Bieber (thank God!). It didn’t come in the hilarious mashup of the isolated vocals of Radiohead’s “Creep” surrounded by the festive sleigh-bells and outrageous piano and back-up singers of “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” It wasn’t the pretty-good-but-not-great House of Heroes cover. It didn’t come by seeing a meme about the song. Instead it came from one of my favorite singers doing a slowed-down rendition, taking the energy of Carey down to be a Christmas song for the exhausted rest of us. 

I DON’T NEED TO HANG MY STOCKING. Am I being too harsh on the holiday classic? Critics loved the song when it came out. If I were writing a blog in 1994, maybe I would have appreciated the musical elements–the throwback to old Christmas songs, the unique chords, the imitation of a wind-up Christmas music box–but in 2021, I’m too desensitized to whatever musical point Carey was trying to make. To me, Christmas music, the more traditional the better. There is something so much more magical about a small church singing on a snowy evening a hymn from the 1400s than Bing Crosby singing in the ’40s. When I was growing up, several CCM Christmas albums captured an old-time Christmas–whether it was Michael W. Smith’s Christmastime or the artists who sang on the City on a Hill Christmas project. There was something about the 20th century Christmas songs that just sounded like shopping. And they were done to death–disco, punk, soul, pick a genre. My old soul, though, has to cope with a commercialized holiday, so Anchor & Braille is as good a place as ever to start. December’s playlist isn’t exclusively Christmas songs and won’t be from here on out, but as the season picks up, I guess we should address the drop in temperature, the new flavors at Starbucks, the decorations at the department stores, the new specials on Netflix–even if it all seems a little forced.