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?

How about a visit to the wonderful world of K-Pop!!!

(What’s K-Pop, you ask? Quoting from Wikipedia:

K-pop (an abbreviation of Korean pop; Hangul: 케이팝) is a musical genre originating in South Korea that is characterized by a wide variety of audiovisual elements. Although it comprises all genres of “popular music” within South Korea, the term is more often used in a narrower sense to describe a modern form of South Korean pop music covering a range of styles including dance-pop, pop ballad, electropop, R&B and hip-hop music. The genre emerged with one of the earliest K-pop groups, Seo Taiji and Boys, forming in 1992. Their experimentation with different styles of music “reshaped Korea’s music scene”. As a result, the integration of foreign musical elements has now become common practice in the K-pop industry.

K-pop entered the Japanese market at the turn of the 21st century and rapidly grew into a subculture among teenagers and young adults of East and Southeast Asia. With the advent of online social networking services, the current global spread of K-pop and Korean entertainment known as the Korean Wave is seen in Latin America, India, North Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere in the Western world.

So there we go!)

I pretty much chose these at random. Do a YouTube search of “Kpop Christmas”, and you turn up a lot of stuff, and that makes sense — this is an enormous genre, and yet I’d bet that most Americans have no idea about it!

My love of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is well-documented, so here’s one of the first season’s funnier song-and-dance numbers: “California Christmastime”.