That Time of Year
Because it just is
Ah, Christmas. Don’t you just love it? Apparently, according to this week’s Listener quiz, we do – some of us maybe a little too much. According to one quiz question 79% of New Zealanders believe that Christmas music should be played only in December. This means that 21%, or within spitting distance of a quarter of us, are okay with hearing Xmas songs any damn time of the year. Personally I feel that wandering a shopping mall and having “Feliz Navidid” piped at me, in March, would be very disconcerting.
So I am solidly in the 79% percent who believe that Christmas should stick to December, the month of its birth, depending on whose calendar you’re going by. Furthermore, I believe shopping malls in this country should adopt the traditional New Zealand approach to Xmas by ignoring it until mid-December, then panicking and throwing up a bunch of tinsel in a huge hurry, while someone searches for the CD of Xmas songs to play on the mall stereo.
But apparently Christmas heralds not only angels singing in shopping malls, but also the start of that time of year when everyone who needs to share their opinion with the world starts making Best Of lists. Best song; best album; best TV show; best movie and so on and so forth.
Luckily for me I am a fiend when it comes to making lists. I love making lists. I love a good To Do list to the point where I will put stuff I have already done onto my To Do list, just for the thrill of crossing it off. Then I will add something along the lines of “remember to put things on To Do list before you Do them”.
I love lists to the extent that Number 2 on my list of Dream Jobs That Don’t Really Exist is “List-maker”. My Number 1 job, in case anyone is interested, is “Invoicer”. This is where, without having to do any actual work, I send invoices for vast amounts of money to corporations I believe make far too much profit. And then they pay me. Yes, there are some who might call this “fraud” but I call it “a fair and equitable redistribution of wealth”.
So, in the spirit of Xmas list-making, here are my Top 3 All-time Christmas Songs:
1. “How to Make Gravy” by Paul Kelly
2. “White Wine in the Sun” by Tim Minchin
3. “Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl
Honorable mentions: “I Believe in Father Christmas” by Greg Lake; “Snoopy’s Christmas” by The Royal Guardsman; “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” by John Lennon
The thing about being a good list-maker, however, is not just making the list (literally anyone can make a list) but being able to sit back and analyse what you have listed and why and what it really all means.
For example, I was tempted to elevate “Fairytale” to #2 this year, but then I realised this was me being overly-sentimental about Shane’s death, to go with my enduring sentimentality over Kirsty’s death. But there is no room for sentimentality in list-making.
I worry that my top 2 songs are both by Australians. On a per-capita basis New Zealand has more great singer-songwriters than any other country on earth so why haven’t we got our own truly great Xmas song?
The Greg Lake song rates an honorable mention because I like a touch of the darkness in a Xmas song, and also as a nostalgic throw-back to my youth when, tragically, I liked prog rock, even to the extent of Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
“Snoopy’s Christmas”, despite being one of the most infuriatingly over-played songs in shopping malls and supermarkets during December, gets an honorable mention because at one stage, when I was a child, it was my #1 Bestest Xmas song ever. Thus it still earns a place in my dark heart, to the extent where it requires a conscious effort for me not to sing along while I’m doing the Xmas shopping. Also I love a good story song. (Spoiler Alert: the Red Baron lets Snoopy live.)
“Happy Xmas” gets the honorable mention because: (a) it is by an ex-Beatle and to not have at least one member of the Beatles on any given song list is tantamount to treason – except if the list is Best Songs Not Written by a Member of the Beatles; and (b) not since good king Wencelas looked out on the Feast of Stephen has a Xmas-themed song had such a cracking opening line.
“So this is Christmas, and what have you done?”
Which says it all about Christmas, really. Doesn’t it?
Which reminds me, I have a shopping list to attend to.