I kind of get the vibe of late that this song is not terribly well-liked, but to me it’s one of the most beautiful Christmas songs of the last thirty years or so. It’s only very tangentially about Christmas — the lyrics mention that it takes place Christmas Eve, and that’s it — but the song always touches something in me, the sense that comes each Christmas, along with all the joy and hope, of memories of friendships gone and loves lost. Some people get really introspective at their birthdays, but for me, it’s always Christmas when I think about roads not taken and whether or not those roads could have been taken at all, of if it even matters.

Anyway, here is Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne”. Maybe it’s a little cheesy, especially with the tenor sax at the end (a friend of mine called it “the Kenny G part” a couple days ago), but it’s a pop song of its time, and there’s nothing wrong with that, really.

Frank and Bing.

Oooooh! I used this a few years ago, but it was on a really really really dodgy copy, that someone posted to YouTube from a worn VHS tape. Now, the official Johnny Carson channel has posted a full, nice copy, complete with the lead-in bit! I was always a huge Johnny Carson fan. I loved his sense of humor: Carson was a master at the bite that somehow didn’t leave a mark. He was just great, and I’ve never forgotten this bit. I saw it when it aired. I think my father and I were in a hotel room on our way back to WNY for one of my college breaks — the Christmas holiday, obviously — and this is just one of those things that you see once and never forget, until years later when you find it on YouTube. Oftentimes the thing you recall doesn’t hold up, but this does.

I manage to find some of the weirdest Christmas shit every year by just searching for some random thing with the word “Christmas”. Here’s a case in point: Hamildolph!

Franz Liszt wrote a suite of fourteen piano pieces late in his life, some of which are based on Christmas carols, and which he collectively titled “The Christmas Tree Suite”. And here it is!

Interestingly, this is not the kind of virtuosic showpiece, full of fire and pianistic pyrotechnics, that one normally associates with the work of Liszt. But there is a good bit of wintry charm here. I’d never heard this piece until yesterday.

This song has been performed by everybody, but never so well as when Judy Garland did it first.

Military music groups at Christmastime! What could be better?