Big Iron’s Honkey-Tonk Holidays (1997)

This anthology from the Big Iron label offers a festive mess of Texas, Xmas, and booze. Original tunes are mixed with a motley of holiday chestnuts, usually of the more lighthearted variety: “Holly Jolly Christmas,” “Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy,” etc. Leading the way on the freewheeling irreverent front is “Alcoholidays” by the Sutcliffs, generally the first song that jumps out, with its memorable chorus of “Old Grand-Dad, Budweiser / It’s good to be drunk again.” True confession, they are sentiments I have lived in holiday seasons past. But the rollicking Honkey-Tonk Holidays is not all western swing mockery and drunkenness. The Sutcliffs may complain that “Little Drummer Boy” is giving them a headache, but Andy Owens & Druha Trava cover it later. There’s room for many points of view here, with sweet country (and/or “alt-country” if we must), a very nice blues or two, and traditional / religious stuff as well, driven by lovely arrangements with horns, a fiddle as needed, and lots of rockin’ good guitar. There’s even an Elvis impersonator to round things off. The Mutineers play “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” like a Halloween fright-fest, with the dark “oh-wee-oh wee-ohhh-oh” chant that signifies the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz at home in her castle safehold—it’s Santa Claus as Satan Claus. You better be good. Cowboys & Indians takes jolly St. Nick a more conventional way on “Santa, Santa,” pleading with him to bring his baby back. “I got cookies, milk, whatever you need.” “Christmas Made for Two” by Mark David Manders & Nuevo Tejas is just beautiful. And the Old 97’s—the only act here I even sort of know—demonstrate as countless others before them that it is virtually impossible to ruin the tender wartime ballad “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” It always sounds good. I suppose you could give it the Roseanne Barr treatment, but please don’t. Honkey-Tonk Holidays is a terrific little Christmas set. I don’t even remember now how I came to acquire it, but I happen to know my brother owns a copy too and I assumed it was in the generally wide currency of things these days. When I came to write it up, however, I discovered how obscure it has become. Apologies! But you really have to hear it once if you can. Happy holidays all!

And All Through the House (1994)

This odd little book was published originally as a longish story in Playboy in December 1984 and then repackaged 10 years later as this novelty gift or collector's item in a children's storybook format. There's not much to it, only 40 pages. How long is a kid's storybook? Wikipedia refers to it as a novella. Lovely scratchy illustrations by Victor Juhasz generously populate the pages. Aside from the random cover art, which can vary widely, Juhasz's illustrations are perhaps the best images we have of Steve Carella, Cotton Hawes, Meyer Meyer, Bert Kling, and a few others, outside our own heads. I thought his Carella was best, and Hawes somehow seemed all wrong. It's a great story, albeit a bit of a joke with punchline. One of the enduring strengths of the 87th Precinct series was Ed McBain's sense of season and time of year, which went beyond weather reports and set pungent moods for the investigations and action. This is a good example, taking place on a snowy Christmas Eve. It's set in the precinct station house, like a Barney Miller episode or the scene in the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York." One by one the detectives show up with various miscreants in tow. I started to get suspicious when one was a boy with a sheep he had stolen from the city zoo, saying he wanted to give it to his sister as a Christmas present. Yes, sure enough, spoilers spoilers spoilers before long a gritty big city nativity scene is assembled. Yes, it's ridiculous, and certainly it's muddled—are the detectives the Romans here, or what?—but it's saved by how well McBain can evoke the feeling of Christmas at a workplace. Sure, it's work, and no one wants to be there, but the pervasive spirit of the holiday can also be there, softening and making things better. McBain famously quarreled publicly (or at least in a passage in one of his novels) with Hill Street Blues about taking ideas from him but this is a lot like a Barney Miller episode, whose run had ended only a year or two earlier. "Good artists borrow, great artists steal," amirite? Merry Christmas all! For McBain fans, I can say the little book was a nice last treat for me, analogous to "Her Majesty" on Abbey Road, because it turned out (only partly by design on my part) to be the last 87th Precinct book in the series that I read. It's always possible something more from the series could surface, of course, but this was a nice way to finish.

In case it's not at the library.

Old 97's, "Holly Jolly Christmas" (1995)

(listen)

If writing about a Christmas song in July is perverse, then I am perverse. But the anthology this comes from, Big Iron's Honkey-Tonk Holidays: Christmas in Deep Noellum, appears to be a hard find now, and maybe you want the time. I know you will want it for the coming season. That’s my story and I'm sticking to it. Written by Johnny Marks, who also concocted "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" and, indeed, made himself something of a specialist in seasonal fare, though he was Jewish (perhaps, somehow, because he was Jewish?), "Holly Jolly Christmas" is, of course, the classic Burl Ives. It blew up out of a 1964 Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special, and Burl has owned it ever since because no one does it better. But that doesn't mean other people shouldn't keep trying, as it's a fine Christmas standard, mercifully short, and there's room on this bus for everyone. Ask Johnny Marks. The Old 97's key right in, keeping it spry and loose, tarting it up with raunchy horns, and inserting a twangy fluid guitar to texture the melody. It feels almost sloppy, but really it's pretty tight, and the song's forward momentum and polish play well against the relaxed performance. Plus it's stubbornly evocative of holiday times. Well, the whole album is, mixing up standards like this and "I'll Be Home for Christmas," "The Little Drummer Boy," and "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" with new models that can hit hard (don't miss "Alcoholidays" by the Sutcliffs). In sum, in short, oh by golly have a holly jolly Christmas, this year.

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

USA, 130 minutes
Director: Frank Capra
Writers: Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra, Jo Swerling, Philip Van Doren Stern, Michael Wilson
Photography: Joseph F. Biroc, Joseph Walker, Victor Milner
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin
Editor: William Hornbeck
Cast: James Stewart, Henry Travers, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell, Beulah Bondi, Frank Faylen, Ward Bond, Gloria Grahame, H.B. Warner, Frank Albertson, Samuel S. Hinds, Mary Treen, Sheldon Leonard

Since coming to terms with how much I like and admire and value the cornball object known as It's a Wonderful Life, I have maintained that it's because the picture is essentially fearless, and not just "for its times," about going right at human depravity. For every saccharine declaration that, "Every time you hear a bell ring, it means that some angel's just got his wings," there's someone mean and surly like Sheldon Leonard standing there saying, "Hey, look, mister, we serve hard drinks in here for men who want to get drunk fast, and we don't need any characters around to give the joint atmosphere." It's almost like the call and response in gospel music, these extremes between whitest whites and blackest blacks, and it's one of the best things I know, short of The Wizard of Oz and Blue Velvet, at sharpening such contrasts and making you feel them viscerally.

I came to it late, finally catching a TV broadcast from beginning to end at some point in the late '80s. I was surprised by how dark it is, even the photography, which verges on pure noir in some sequences, and Universal-style horror in others. It's not just that it's a story about a man who has decided suicide is his best option (nor that it's unafraid to use the word "suicide" plain). The fact is it's just good all through, with a screenplay that expertly juggles its many extremities, and top-notch performances. It boldly rears back and lets loose a story in excruciating detail of lifelong frustration and disappointment, the story of George Bailey (played brilliantly by James Stewart in one of his greatest performances), who keeps seeing his dream denied of escaping the small upstate New York town in which he was born and has lived all his life, that dream so systematically denied that his interior life shrivels to the point where, in a moment of uncalculated despair, he can cry out to his wife, "You call this a happy family? Why do we have to have all these kids?"

The Sinatra Christmas Album (1963)

I am convinced that the cool calm of January February is the proper time to assess Christmas music—my story, I'm sticking to it. Released originally in 1957 as A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra, I came to know this on vinyl with the cover pictured above, the rerelease in the early '60s. I pulled it out of a cutout bin in the late '70s. I think it's now considered a classic of the seasonal fare. I don't normally go for Sinatra much—a great voice and a singer with superb technical chops, but I've never been able to get far past the general soullessness. But I've really become attached to this over the years. I was surprised the first time I heard it by the goofy, swingin', hepcat "J-I-N-G-L-E / B-E-double-L-S" treatment that "Jingle Bells" endures here (never one of the great Xmas songs anyway, of course, but kids like it because it's easy to play and sing, or anyway I did), and I'm surprised still that the second side, from "The First Noel" to "Silent Night," is all devoted to religious fare. Different times, different times. I became infatuated with it when I was working nightshifts in a nursing home. The dayroom for the nursing station I tended was decked out for the holidays in the kind of sad and shabby fashion that's not hard to imagine. The album was part of the little collection of records gathered there and in the darkest deeps of the night that December, along about the two o'clock or three o'clock hours, I used to wander down to the dayroom and turn on the colored lights and play it on the crappy thrift store record player someone had brought in. I sat there in one of the rickety rocking chairs, playing it soft and rocking and thinking about things like my future and my past and where everything was headed. It was deliciously sad start to finish under the circumstances, notably the woeful "I'll Be Home for Christmas" and "The Christmas Waltz," with Sinatra's sad little "Merry Christmas!" right at the end of it. If I was in the mood sometimes I flipped it over and played the church songs. More often I just played the first side once or twice, or three times. All those associations are buried in it for me still, even sitting in front of my computer all this time later playing it on iTunes. Sometimes, with everything, it's so complex and so beautiful all at once that it's almost too much. I think that's the kind of thing Christmas does to you.

6. John & Yoko and the Plastic Ono Band with the Harlem Community Choir, "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" (1972)

(listen)

Is there any music more willfully isolated and sequestered as what swamps us every December? By the math, on a rational basis and objectively speaking, a handful or better of titles on a list like this, or approximately 8.3%, should be Christmas music. But does that ever happen? No—not least probably by dint of the resentments raised in so many of us bludgeoned by it in public spaces and via media every year. I share this problem but I also have a secret to tell you. There's a lot of Christmas music I like a lot, from Brenda Lee's "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" to the Phil Spector holiday album to classics by all the usual suspects, Nat King Cole and Burl Ives and even Andy Williams. I even love many of the hymns, in their time and place. For many years after the murder of John Lennon, starting in fact that very year of 1980 when I made a point of acquiring this single, this was how I greeted the Christmas morning: "So this is Christmas and what have you done, / Another year over, a new one just begun." I wanted very much for it to become a holiday standard (as much as, later, when I discovered it, I wanted it again for Big Star's "Jesus Christ," an even more hopeless cause). Perhaps it has finally become one across these long decades, though I haven't noticed it on any radio station I listen to any more than "Fairytale of New York" (#37 on this list, which means I actually made a 2% Christmas nut, which I bet you $10,000 is better than anyone else offering up a list of 100 favorite songs). Now "Happy Xmas" sounds to me more diminished, sad and echoing with faraway memories of a distantly remembered past. But if that's not one perfectly apt description of the best Christmas music, I don't know what is.

Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

 

USA, 96 minutes 

Director/writer: George Seaton 

Photography: Lloyd Ahern, Charles G. Clarke 

Cast: Maureen O'Hara, John Payne, Edmund Gwenn, Gene Lockhart, Natalie Wood, Porter Hall, William Frawley, Jerome Cowan, Philip Tonge 

I saw this last fall shortly after a visit to New York—hence, I suppose, in the mythical New York state of mind, thankyouverymuch Billy Joel—and what impressed and surprised me first was how genuine to the city it felt, with its Thanksgiving Day Parade and casual references to the geography, even the title, and indeed the whole Macy/Gimbels rivalry plot point, all of which makes sense given that it was shot on location. I also recall this one, growing up in the '60s, as among the older, generally second-tier Christmas fare that aired every December (each one a must-see classic according to one person or another, though the ardor, not to mention the opportunities, always passed as quickly as the season). I always meant to see it, as so many of them prove perfectly worthwhile (though not all of them—this Christmas entertainment is a tricky business), but I never did through all these years. It was actually better than I expected, nicely low-key and almost somber as it goes about the usual business of attempting to reclaim the "real" "spirit" of Christmas. Natalie Wood is suitably adorable as a precocious 6-year-old, Edmund Gwenn is a better Santa than Burl Ives himself, and John Payne reminded me weirdly of John Cusack. Always nice to see William Frawley in anything. Merry Christmas all!