Me Me Me

“Christmas records” — nobody calls them that anymore. Only old fogies like me still think of holiday recordings as LPs with Andy Williams or Nat King Cole sitting in the snow on the cover. When I was little, we bought a Christmas compilation record every year put out by a tire company (Firestone?) that had Steve and Eydie singing “Let It Snow” alongside Robert Goulet and Carol Lawrence singing “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” Neither of those couples stayed together, by the way, but they sure could sing a nice Christmas duet.

Anyway, the point is that Thanksgiving has arrived, which means that I get to listen to Christmas music for the next month. ONLY Christmas music. Since the Hendersons are 21st century people, my vast collection of Christmas records has been loaded onto our nifty Bose sound system, and I can scroll down to find my favorites, such as Gloria Estefan, Mariah Carey, Amy Grant, Clay Aiken (don’t laugh! it’s great!) and last year’s obsession, Mr. Josh Groban. I try to buy a new Christmas record every year. Some fall flat (sorry, James Taylor) and some become instant faves (Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers). I also have old-school compilations cadged from the Firestone era and newer ones put out by Starbucks and Old Navy. I am a fanatic. Classics? Messiah? Sometimes. But nothing beats a great rendition of “Silver Bells.”

After all these years of being force-fed holiday ditties for an entire month, my kids are well-versed in the Christmas oeuvre and don’t mind having “Chestnuts roasting” as background noise when they’re home. The only problem is that the Bose system memorizes your “favorites” and spits them back at you randomly for the rest of the year. You have to teach it not to revert to Christmas mode, which takes at least six months, and I feel sad every time it tries to play a holiday song for me. “Not yet,” I tell it. “We can’t start until Thanksgiving.”

Tags: Amy Grant, Christmas music, Clay Aiken, Gloria Estefan, Josh Groban, Mariah Carey

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 27th, 2008 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.