One of these years I’ll make it to see a live performance of The Nutcracker. Until then, this can suffice:

Don’t have time for the whole thing? Here’s the Suite that Tchaikovsky arranged. I played this every year in college, and it’s one of few pieces of music that has a very strong time-and-place association for me.

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For some reason, this has been on my mind for a bit this year…and I’m not sure I’ve thought about it in years before that. It’s the first season Christmas episode of The Wonder Years. In this episode, young Kevin and his brother have united forces to try to get their parents to spring for their first ever color television set, while Kevin wonders what he should get Winnie Cooper for Christmas, after she has given him a surprise gift (which he doesn’t know what it is). Kevin waffles — he wants to get her perfume, but settles on a snow globe — and then he goes to give it to her, but she isn’t home. Her family has gone away, because this is their first Christmas since Winnie’s older brother died in Vietnam.

This is the episode’s final sequence. Sorry about the dodgy video, but…the point comes through.

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You don’t often hear straight performances of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” these days, do you? It seems that every take on that song has to introduce at least some sort of comedic element, like the Johnny Carson version I offered the other day. But then it occurred to me that except for caroling singalongs, nobody ever does a straight-up version of “Twelve Days” anymore!

Examples include, of course, this one by Straight No Chaser, which gets tons of airplay every year:

And then there’s the Canadian Brass, with a version that should appeal to classical music lovers (especially brass players):

I heard this rendition — actually pretty much a new song, based on the original, with a dark twist — just last night on the radio:

Of course, you have John Denver and the Muppets, who don’t do much to “comedify” the song other than play up the personalities of every single muppet who participates. I appreciate this minimalistic approach to being funny!

It wasn’t always like this, though. For nice, straight renditions of Christmas songs, the go-to is almost always Mr. Crosby:

And finally, the mighty forces of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and friends.

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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.

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Frank and Bing.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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

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