A history of alt.Xmas
Christmas as we know it is only a hundred years old, and pop songs about Santa helped define it. I’ve collected offbeat Xmas recordings for decades, an eclectic history of a world outside the Mariah-Wham!Bing snowglobe.
Click the icons below (desktop only for now) to stream most of my faves. Click my name on YouTube Music for more focused playlists.
From a rare little EP out of shibuya-kei from 1992 that has pretty much disappeared, a brief amuse-bouche.
No qusestions, just a huge THANK YOU for this huge and hugely enjoyable Christmas music history. Wishing you and yours a wonderful holiday.
Thanks for stopping by! I assume your handle is about the fabulous Nina Simone; I’m going to post a song by her RIGHT NOW. Really appreciate your note. Merry Christmas!
The Feast of Stephen is still two days off, but in 1959 Miss Nina Simone dovetailed Rogers & Hart’s “Little Girl Blue” with a 13th century melody (later given a lyric about a 10th century Bohemian saint who was not a king) and it’s a nice thing to contemplate eleven hundred years of history on Christmas Eve.
Christmas Eve insomnia is a tradition worthy of a playlist.
Amazon doesn’t embed well on Tumblr, but click on the too-big-to-bother widget below to buy/stream this 2005 Brit-pop song by Baxendale: essential to today’s theme. (Also on Spotify and iTunes.)
Yuletide mainstay Christmas Aguilera captures the bleary-eyed joy:
You may prefer to blame your insomnia on a mythical being.
Carter Moulton’s video of his 2011 “Walking in the Air” (the ultimate Christmas insomniac’s fantasy) includes animation from The Snowman and doesn’t suck (once you get past Bowie’s cringe intro).
21st-century classic with the hot take we all needed:
Alton Ellis’s 1969 “Sunday Coming” had a Christmas version.
Jacob Collier’s spunky bedroom-pop arrangement of the 17th century folk carol captures the pure joy unfettered talent can bring.
Bearing further witness with the senses, this recording from Anaïs Mitchell and Thomas “Doveman” Bartlett retains Longfellow’s Civil War lyric but deconstructs Johnny Marks’s melody in just the right way. The instrumental brings out Doveman’s contribution.
Christmas on your tongue, from 2015.
Maxwell Farrington’s spine-tingling vocal brings home the sensual thrill of love in winter.
In 2008, Glasvegas helped us feel the texture of Christmas.
The audience for Alt.Xmas is so small special, and fans of its entire history a minuscule fraction of that, so a yearly mix becomes a White Elephant. Better to provide a resource for the intrepid and let the snowflakes fall as they may.
It’s a big old mess, but my omnibus compilation has 500 songs from fifty-plus years of collecting music from all #theErasofAlt.Xmas. (Hit that tag to get the full overview of my unapologetically subjective, ever-changing history of a full century of Christmas Music I Like.)
Youtube Music isn’t exactly curator-friendly, but has the most comprehensive selection of Alt.Xmas tracks. I recommend shuffle play for the yuletide serendipity. Like and skip as the eggnog compels you, and make merry with the songs that inspire your own traditions.
I’m duplicating it on Spotify but it’s much shorter because Spotify.
Southern hemisphere aside, snow makes for a Solstice topic that captures your gaze, slows you down, and doesn’t usually overstay its welcome.
Manchester’s I Am Kloot delivered this homage in 2001.
San Francisco theremin lounge band Project: Pimento have the perfect soundtrack for stumbling through the drifts.
This 2016 French compilation came and went with barely a trace.
Lorna have been producing great Christmas songs for twenty years.
My birthday gift in 1965 was a reissue of Harry Simeone’s Little Drummer Boy (recorded 1959). Yeah, you hate me right now.
Not being a cool kid, I succumbed. I’d seen Sound of Music the previous summer, so it was fun when I discovered the original 1951 recording by no less than the Trapp Family Singers.
It’s hip to hate this song: one hook on endless loop, child labor, the humblebrag of Christian grace, onomatopoeia? Please.
Being shameless (obvs), I’m happy to fix this post now for the non-haters. Tap your poison.
Cheekyboy (Johnny Cash mashup)
And for Jim:
When Dean Wareham gave Marlene Dietrich’s 1964 version a solid shoutout, it made my day.
Finally, a newish (2022) version by Jon Bell that works really well.
I often rail against the Mariah-Wham!Bing snowglobe, but without these tentpole mega-hits, Christmas music wouldn’t be a thing, and the alt.universe in which I dwell would not exist.
I’m not a complete monster.
Among the other Christian things that got secularized in the 20th century, prayers became letters to Santa. Everyone needs a fixer.
After an off-Broadway stint as a Shirley Temple knockoff opposite Bernadette Peters, Bayn Johnson became a guitarist and singer on The Electric Company. Recorded between those two unforgettable gigs, this B-side to the nightmarish “Christmas Teddy Bear” is well worthy of its 82 seconds.
Before stints at él and in Shibuya-kei, renaissance man Louis Philippe made this sweet little record in 1981 as The Arcadians.
Eddy Howard quit Stanford med school to croon. From 1947.
Mr Little Jeans out of LA, charming AF in 2014.
For a while I assumed it was Carol Channing, but this forgotten rarity from 1958 is by former vaudeville stars The Duncan Sisters, whose only other claim to infamy was an ill-conceived stint in blackface.
Spoiler alert: The Fools just want a puppy.
The closest Deck the Halls comes to a Christmas reference is “yuletide” (gringo for “Solstice BC”). I can’t find Alt.Xmas takes on this nerdy party banger from before the 1960s, a full century after English lyrics were added to a 16th Century Welsh song about New Year’s Eve. Those lyrics were a bit too boozy for puritanical Americans, who instead started “donning gay apparel” when the song crossed over.
One-shot wonder Little Jimmy Thomas hit it out of the park in 1964:
Three years later, Chicago’s Saturday’s Children mashed it up with Dave Brubeck’s huge jazz hit “Take Five.”
Gaga’s 2008 collaboration with Space Cowboy borrows today’s theme melody and deserves a proper flashmob video. Picture echelon-formation choreography helping a few prudes grasp the full metaphorical significance of the title.
The Lumineers promise someday to release “the saddest Christmas album ever!” and I say bring it.
In 1930, this duo’s playful bickering started a very long tradition of novelty Christmas records.
During the Musicians’ Strike of 1942-44, Dolores Brown managed to record a winter elegy to straying love that we’ll chalk up to Santa.
Props to Guinness World Record holder George Lee Andrews, who sang it in 1976 at Manhattan Theater Club, but the (demon) Mayor of Sunnydale brought a Scrooge-worthy grievance to this 1994 recording.
With upbeat irony, the Lathums remind us that Santa’s often downplayed alter-ego is still very much a thing.
With a gorgeous melody and arrangement, this track from 2021 trawls the far side of Christmas and just barely manages to stumble back home on the final line.
Under Matt Pond’s other moniker, he made this thrilling ballad in 2022, which I think of as celebrating all the long-suffering partners of Christmas music weirdos like me.
Way back in 2015, ridiculously prolific Freedom Fry gave us this festive morsel of yuletide side-eye.
Alfie Whitby made a Christmas song in 2017 that kinda nails it.
