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From time to time, I tend to write about Christ­mas music on this site, mainly because I enjoy the stuff (in mod­er­a­tion) and because it’s an inter­est­ing phe­nom­e­non. While music trends tend to go all over the place, with styles con­stantly chang­ing and tastes bounc­ing to what­ever the lat­est song in rota­tion is, Christ­mas music remains unchanged. Every year, cur­ren­tish artists release Christ­mas albums (usu­ally some­what estab­lished — new releases this year from James Tay­lor, Sarah McLach­lan, Bette Midler, Wynonna, and Rachael Ray… WHA?) that are usu­ally well received but break no new ground (Ray’s is a joke, obvi­ously. The album has her name on it but is a col­lec­tion of songs by other artists that were selected by Rachael, I guess. Her site kind of sucks.) Newer artists put out more “cur­rent” Christ­mas music, usu­ally either chang­ing reg­u­lar Christ­mas music into their par­tic­u­lar style or occa­sion­ally putting out an attempt at a new song, usu­ally keep­ing it vague enough as to not really men­tion Christ­mas or even “hol­i­day” that much so that the song can stay in rota­tion more than one month of the year.

The thing with Christ­mas music though is that peo­ple will always grav­i­tate towards the older and more famil­iar ver­sions of those tra­di­tional songs. It’s prob­a­bly related to the con­nec­tion most peo­ple have with music and mem­ory — the best mem­o­ries most peo­ple have of Christ­mas is child­hood, so the pre­ferred music is going to be music that is usu­ally at least twenty years old. How­ever, it’s almost always going to go back fur­ther than that, since the child­hood mem­o­ries are going to res­onate with those adults who will play (and request) that music around the Christ­mas sea­son, result­ing in their chil­dren hear­ing it (and as a result asso­ci­at­ing it with the hol­i­day), repeat­ing the process. Other songs will creep in, but chances are in 2040 some­one is still going to be play­ing Bing Crosby’s ver­sion of White Christ­mas, nearly 100 years after its ini­tial release.

Me? As a native Long Islander I was raised with not only the Christ­mas music of my par­ents (who didn’t really have a huge col­lec­tion) but with the Yule Log, pump­ing out true tra­di­tional Christ­mas music from clas­si­cal artists who weren’t always iden­ti­fi­able, I was raised with a more tra­di­tional feel to my Christ­mas music. There was a good deal of instru­men­tal music in there as well, and for the aver­age kid who wanted to hear “Jin­gle Bells” and the Chip­munks, it was an adjust­ment that we got used to. I guess when newer artists remake Christ­mas music, it just comes off like an imi­ta­tion of the orig­i­nal, and why would you want an imi­ta­tion when you can get the real thing?

There are excep­tions, though. Mariah Carey seemed to make an effort when she released her Christ­mas album in 1994. Mariah, being this whole pop dar­ling who was still respected for her voice and vocal range while still remain­ing uber­hot (pre-divorce and pre-slutification), decided to release a Christ­mas album as many of her adult con­tem­po­rary peers have done (and will con­tinue to do). Mariah co-wrote a few songs to mix in with the tra­di­tional hits, and the album was mar­keted excep­tion­ally well. Sony, at the time of the albums release, gave three pro­mo­tional sin­gles to radio sta­tions, each one cater­ing to the par­tic­u­lar for­mat of the sta­tion — the catchy “All I Want For Christ­mas Is You” to pop/top 40 sta­tions, the bal­lad “Miss You Most (At Christ­mas Time)” was sent to R&B and Adult Con­tem­po­rary sta­tions, and “Jesus Born On This Day” was sent to Chris­t­ian sta­tions — all at least co-written by Carey. Addi­tion­ally, a cover of the tra­di­tional “Joy To The World” (albeit with unnec­es­sary segue to Three Dog Night) was also pro­moted, get­ting four songs off the album into the radio rota­tion across almost every genre. The expo­sure worked, and now Merry Christ­mas is con­sid­ered the most suc­cess­ful Christ­mas album of all time. While “Miss You Most (At Christ­mas Time)” still gets played here and there, “All I Want For Christ­mas Is You” stays in heavy Christ­mas rota­tion and will con­tinue to make Mariah (and her estate) money for a long time.

And then there’s Andy Williams.

Out­side of the realm of Christ­mas music, I know of and have heard even less of Andy Williams. I know that he was a pop­u­lar singer of his time (the 60s) and I just kind of lumped him in with the Tony Bennett/Paul Anka/Perry Como group that I’m pretty indif­fer­ent about. A few years back though, I real­ized that Andy sung my favorite ver­sion of “It’s the Most Won­der­ful Time of the Year”, a song that just kind of screamed Christ­mas (I would later learn that it was essen­tially his song, first released on his Christ­mas album in 1963). Johnny Mathis’s ver­sion is heard about as often, but the way Andy sings it some­how com­bines a inno­cent Christ­mas song with the swag­ger of an Irish drink­ing song. Lis­ten to it — you could sway back and forth lis­ten­ing to it, eas­ily drink­ing a pint of Guin­ness instead of your egg nog. It just has that band accom­pa­ni­ment that pounds the song home, get­ting more and more over­bear­ing (in a good way) that forces you — I say FORCES you damn it! — to note that yes, it is in fact the most won­der­ful time of the year. This was a good thing, and I thought it would be the Andy Williams con­tri­bu­tion to my ulti­mate Christ­mas music album.

Not so fast, my friend. (Too much NCAA 2007 lately. Hi Lee Corso!)

A few years ago, some­one decided to try other tracks on Andy’s Christ­mas album and the “Happy Holidays/The Hol­i­day Sea­son” melody started to get rota­tion. “Happy Hol­i­days” was orig­i­nally writ­ten by Irv­ing Berlin for the movie Hol­i­day Inn (known bet­ter for another Berlin tune sung by Bing Crosby, White Christ­mas) and “The Hol­i­day Sea­son” was writ­ten by Kay Thomp­son, who toured with Andy and his broth­ers before Andy’s main­stream record­ing suc­cess (Kay would also write the Eloise books, based on the adven­tures of young Liza Min­nelli — who knew?) Hol­i­days is pretty straight­for­ward, but Sea­son has a swarmi­ness (a good one, not a dirty one) that swings like a song from that era can, and would sound com­plete stu­pid in a con­tem­po­rary song now.

Williams starts off with the “Happy Hol­i­days” cho­rus, a basic repet­i­tive ges­ture that isn’t out of the ordi­nary. Then Williams goes into the “Hol­i­day Sea­son” part, jump­ing like six octaves to say Santa Claus (San–TEH Claus, is com–ING down..) before not­ing that Santa’s going to be “com­ing down the chim­ney down”.

He’ll be com­ing… down… the chim­ney… down. Because the sec­ond time you say down, it just gets stressed all the much more. To back this up, his back­ground singers repeat the line, just to make sure you understood.

We then get to the bridge, where Andy explains what Santa’s (or San–TEH Claus, I should say) bring­ing us, doing so in the rarely used A/ABC/CB four line rhyme scheme:

He’ll have a big fat pack upon his back
And lots of good­ies for you and me
So leave a pep­per­mint stick for old St. Nick
Hang­ing on the Christ­mas tree

Always a good reminder to bribe Santa. I thought you were sup­posed to leave the guy cook­ies, but appar­ently he’ll eat your orna­ments if you’re not careful.

It’s the next verse that drew me in. Kay Thomp­son at this point either had some of Judy Garland’s cock­tail or had a stroke as she was right­ing lyrics because Andy just sounds like he’s mak­ing up words to fill out the song. Williams skill­fully makes “whoop-de-doo” and “dickory-dock” into lines for the verse, segue­ing that into a warning/reminder to “hang up your sock” because Sant… er, San–TEH Claus shows up at exactly mid­night. EXACTLY. 12 o’ clock (see? more rhyming) he will be com­ing down the chim­ney… down. Again with the dou­ble down (Andy must have liked him some black­jack) which is again backed up by his back­ground singers who repeat the dou­ble down. Frankly, I can’t imag­ine how Andy can sing the song using the “ock” rhyme scheme with­out going all Eazy-E on us. I know I have dif­fi­culty, and my dear wife did it the other day to my feigned shock and amusement.

After the dou­ble down x2, those same back­ground singers bring us back the “Happy Hol­i­days” song, to which Andy belts out a Happy HOLIDAYS twice, each time with increas­ing force until even the most jaded Jehovah’s Wit­ness would crum­ble and buy a wreath. If there was ever a singer who forced you to do what he was singing, it was Andy Williams. Lucky he used his power for good instead of evil — the man could have been a more pow­er­ful Hitler.