December 22, 2022

Daily Diary, Day 842: My Favorite Things #14 Christmas Music

While you might call me an agnostic secular humanist, I was brought up by parents within a specific religious tradition that included Christmas carols. It also included all the trappings of the holiday (freshly cut evergreen tree that was over decorated with a large creche and presents under it, wreath on the door, outside of house trimmed with colored lights, and occasionally actual snow since I grew up in Pittsburgh PA. And Christmas songs playing for about a week on the radio.

As a result, since I am also hopelessly sentimental, I love Christmas music because it bring up lots of warm and fuzzy memories from childhood.

However, as an adult, for decades I spent the week before Christmas grading hundreds of final exams and papers. Not something I enjoyed, but how I got through that week each year was to get a tree and decorate it before I started grading so I would have it to look at (and smell). Then my husband would make yummy Christmas cookies that I would have as a snack when I had graded a certain number of exams, and I would listen to Christmas music the whole time I was grading.

My poor husband is not as sentimental—or at the very least does not have quite the positive memories of Christmas as a child—and his taste in music is fairly sophisticated (heavy on Jazz and classical) so that Christmas music--no matter how well done--would ever be his first choice to listen to…ever. But not only did he indulge me in this behavior every year, he searched out and bought me Christmas albums to add to my collection as a present each year. By retirement, I had over 30 albums that ranged from classics sung by Bing Crosby and Nate King Cole, to a punk rock album.

This photo is a picture of some of my favorites over the years. They are The Bells of Dublin by the Chieftains, We Three Kings by the Roches, Noel by Joan Baez, A Merry Little Christmas by Linda Ronstadt, One More Drifter in the Snow by Aimee Mann, The Christmas Belles by 14 great singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, and Alligator Stomp which is seventeen songs by Cajun artists.

We no longer put up a tree, I can’t eat the Christmas cookies, and I certainly can’t look forward to snow here in San Diego, but I can listen to my Christmas albums, and that is certainly one of my favorite things to do this time of year. Do you have a favorite holiday song or album?