The Kinks, "Father Christmas"

You won’t be surprised to learn that over the years I’ve made a ton of digital playlists. All of these are archived in my laptop’s Apple Music app, with a handful copied over into Spotify as well, and when I crack them open, they have the effect of carrying me back to the moment in time when I first made and played the hell out them. Well, all except one.

After more than two decades my “Christmas Elf” playlist remains a work in progress, untethered to any particular moment in time—that is, assuming you don’t count “every damn December” as a particular moment in time. Every year on Thanksgiving weekend I fire up this playlist, and once I’ve started it spinning, the eclectic riches of Christmas Elf comprise the principal soundtrack for my next month, up to and through Christmas Day—and often as not deep into January, up to the point where I can’t justify or defend playing holiday music anymore.

Typically I first dig in on Black Friday, when I start the project of stringing up the lights. And just like in the old parable of The Footsteps in the Sand, the 45 (as of now) tracks on Christmas Elf largely carry me through the many adversities of this undertaking. Maybe it’s the Jackson 5 (Apple Music, Spotify) firing my legs as I haul the 900-pound extension ladder up from the basement, doinking it repeatedly off my knee. Or it’s Darlene Love’s voice (Apple Music, Spotify) lifting me up while I’m picking the Gordian Knot of our icicle lights, then finding, upon plugging them in, that half of a given strand won’t turn on.

We have a number of traditions inscribed into our Christmases here on Pearl Street. Some—like our Christmas Eve dessert and drinks party with friends, and the last-minute McDonald’s takeout dinner that precedes it—are carried over from Kate’s childhood. Others, like our yearly trip to see the Holiday Pops, are our own joint innovations.

Christmas Elf stands apart from these other traditions, because it is entirely my own. I alone have compiled and curated these songs. I exercise full control over this enterprise, and I retain the discretion to make adjustments—additions and subtractions—as needed. I fill my ears and my life with this music for very nearly 10% of each year. If you’re living or working with, near, or around me, you will have to listen to these songs. And yes, it’s this Playlist ringing out through the house at that Christmas Eve party each year. In the great American spirit of the Christmas holiday, I declare the Tradition of the Christmas Elf Playlist to be mine mine mine mine mine.

The precise details of the Playlist’s origin are lost in the sands of time. But loaded on my iPhone is a much shorter version of it, titled “Christmas Elf (Original).” That playlist has 19 songs on it and is 59 minutes long—i.e., it has as many songs as would fit on a 60-minute recordable CD. This document reminds me that years ago I was in the habit of burning the Playlist to CD and mailing copies around the country to friends. I certainly gifted the Original Elf more than once to co-workers, either directly or through Yankee swaps at the holiday party. That latter proposition—where I didn’t know exactly who would get the CD—was a bit dicey, given the profane and emphatically un-PC content in some of the songs. To date, though, I have not been reported to HR.

Most of the, um, irreverent songs were pulled from the CD copy of Rhino Records’ Punk Rock Xmas compilation, which I fished out of the Musicland racks—or was it National Record Mart’s?—at the Eastwood Mall sometime before the turn of the century. Copyright on that CD is 1995, so it was most definitely the late ’90s when I first tuned into “It’s Christmas” by Bouquet of Veal (Apple Music, Spotify), “Hooray for Santa Claus (Theme from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians)” (Apple Music, Spotify) by Sloppy Seconds, and the Dickies’ high-octane cover of “Silent Night” (Apple Music, Spotify).

The crown jewel of the Rhino compilation is the UK single edit of the Ramones’ “Merry Christmas (I Don’t Wanna Fight Tonight)” (YouTube) that is, for me, the canonical and far superior version of this song, but not the one the streaming services carry. For this reason—and also because the streamers don’t carry Shonen Knife’s “Space Christmas” (YouTube), the Spotify playlist I embedded upstairs in this post falls a bit short of the master collection of .mp3 files I have loaded on my laptop, iPods, and phone. Between the Spotify Less-Than playlist and the mods suggested in this paragraph, you have all the schematics you need to make your own clone of the True Christmas Elf. But it will require some work on your part.

The details of how I got here are lost in the sands of time. As far as I can reconstruct, the First Edition of the Elf Playlist consisted principally of songs pulled from five disparate and incompatible sources:

1. The aforementioned Punk Rock Xmas compilation.

2. The Harry Simeone Chorale’s Little Drummer Boy LP (1958).

3. The soundtrack to the 1966 animated adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

4. Individual Christmas and Christmas-adjacent songs that I happened to find on albums in my collection, including the Pogues’ picture-perfect “Fairytale of New York” (Apple Music, Spotify)¹; The Pretenders’ “2000 Miles” (Apple Music, Spotify), from Learning To Crawl; and “Christmas” (Apple Music, Spotify), off the Who’s Tommy record.

5. A handful of songs I remembered seeing on MTV and downloaded from Napster. E.g., Bowie & Bing’s arrangement of “The Little Drummer Boy” (Apple Music, Spotify), John & Yoko’s “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)” (Apple Music, Spotify), and “Father Christmas” by the Kinks (Apple Music, Spotify).

Let’s pause for a minute and make some observations. For starters, that Who song is entirely devoid of holiday spirit. Tommy doesn’t know what day it is. He doesn’t know who Jesus was or what praying is. HOW CAN HE BE SAVED FROM THE ETERNAL GRAVE? Townsend and Daltrey pose a valid theological question here, asking whether a child’s raft of disabilities will deny him access to salvation. Still, though, Tommy’s (likely) road to Purgatory is some heavy subject matter, when placed alongside Alvin Chipmunk’s bid for a hula hoop. Even so, the Who’s sad-sack “Christmas” song is as part of the holiday canon for me as “Jingle Bells.”

Second, I want to single out the Bomboras’ “Lil’ Drummer Boy” (Apple Music, Spotify) for special mention. A work colleague referred me to the Bomboras, an L.A.-based surf rock band, in the late 1990s. Their Swingin’ Singles LP is one of, I dunno, 600 CDs packed in over, under, behind, and around this desk. I can’t remember the last time I played it through. But my God, that “Lil’ Drummer Boy” cover! It’s Dick Dale’s “Misirlou” (Apple Music, Spotify) crashing the manger scene in Bethlehem, and it makes me want to run through a wall, Kool-Aid Man-style, to greet the Christ Child. Any sensible person made aware of this song—that’s you now, Reader—should keep “Lil’ Drummer Boy” in heavy rotation, and not just during The Season.

Third and finally, recalling that I accessed Napster for a lot of these songs has helped me zero in on the point in time when the Playlist first came together—certainly no earlier than December 1999, and most definitely before 2002.

In the 20+ years since I carried these original tablets down from Mt. Crumpet, I’ve had occasion, and good reason, to make a number of amendments. In most cases, amendment has meant supplementation. What started out at a lean 19 has grown to 45 and counting, and I still don’t feel the playlist is getting loose and baggy. Whenever you’re adding Springsteen or the Waitresses to a playlist, you’re packing on pure muscle. And when those tracks are “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Christmas Wrapping” (Apple Music, Spotify), you’d better hope that holiday mix isn’t on a regular PED testing schedule.

A brief note about the Waitresses: I’ve described them elsewhere as a more complex and lyrically interesting (if shorter-lived) Blondie, and the delta here is never more apparent than when you compare “Christmas Wrapping” with Blondie’s “Rapture.” In both of these tracks a female-fronted new wave band makes an early run at a rap record (Wrapping, Rapture—get it?). But only one of these records is brilliant, and the fact that it happens to be holiday-themed is just icing on the Bûche de Noël.

I’m not shy about adding new songs to Christmas Elf, but when I do, hard questions can arise. After all, it’s a high-stakes proposition to improve upon perfection. Quandaries abound. E.g., do I dare introduce U2’s version of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” (Apple Music, Spotify), when I already have Darlene Love’s? Surely that TONIGHT THANK GOD IT’S THEM INSTEAD OF YOU line from “Do They Know It’s Christmas” (Apple Music, Spotify) is quite enough Bono for any holiday season … right?

And one year I was resolved to add the “Hallelujah Chorus” (Apple Music, Spotify) from Handel’s Messiah. We sang this in Music class in elementary school; Mrs. Meehan drilled us for hours on this, and I loved every minute of it. But where does a track like that fit in the play order with punk rock arrangements of Christmas carols? For that matter, where should any new addition land in the existing sequence? By now I have the Playlist committed to memory: when Song G ends, Song H must begin. Inserting any track, much less a classical piece, in between them risks wrecking the flow and can take years to get used to.

There’s an easy solution to that, you’re thinking. Just tack the new songs on at the end. To which I answer: Sir/Madam, how DARE you!?! It is a truth universally accepted (by me) that only two songs have ever been suitable for closing out the Christmas Elf playlist: the aforementioned “Happy Xmas” from John & Yoko and—recent addition—the Long Blondes’ lovely and heartbreaking “Christmas Is Cancelled”² (Apple Music, Spotify). I will consider no other proposals.

While we’re on the subject of cancelation, let’s talk about what is most decidedly not a dilemma for me, nor even a quandary—and that’s how to handle songs with frowned-upon themes or objectionable lyrics. The F-slur in “Fairytale of New York” leaps to mind here. And of late it seems that whenever “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (Apple Music, Spotify) is mentioned, everyone on hand must straightaway go on record flatly disclaiming any endorsement of Louis Jordan’s courtship tactics. I’m inclined to think Ella was able to take care of herself—and wasn’t that the point of the song? In any case, with all apologies to the right-thinking liberals here in Boston, there will be no cancelations here. As I wrote earlier, Christmas Elf has never been for the faint of heart. And I like to keep my Christmas politics-free.

Well, mostly. Let’s talk about the fun-as-hell Marxism Lite of my all-time favorite Christmas song, which is the Kinks’ “Father Christmas.”

Early on MTV had a handful of Christmas videos it would show during the holiday season. That Bowie/Bing duet was one of these; “Father Christmas” was another. For years after it dropped out of the MTV rotation, I could recall only the first line of the chorus—Father Christmas, give us some money—and it always made me smile. It’s always a risk to track down and cue up a song you fondly remember but haven’t heard for years. More often than not it disappoints: it sounds different, feels different, carries a lot of extraneous notes that don’t sit right with you years later.

That said, when it occurred to me one December evening to pull “Father Christmas” down from Napster, I was not disappointed. Here’s the full chorus:

Father Christmas, give us some money. We got no time for your silly toys. We’ll beat you up if you don’t hand it over. We want your bread so don’t make us annoyed. Give all the toys to the little rich boys.

Genius. Perfectly irreverent, and like any Kinks song, catchy as hell. Their reference to “a Steve Austin outfit” in the second verse is spot-on for me: I went as the Six Million Dollar Man for Halloween when I was in kindergarten. And the few lines that Ray Davies sings in earnest at the end land as well or better than Bono’s injunction in “Do They Know It’s Christmas”:

Have yourself a merry merry Christmas. Have yourself a good time. But remember the kids who got nothin’ while you’re drinkin’ down your wine.

Or in my case, while I’m rocking out to the Kinks.

1. For much, much more on this track, see “If I Should Fall from Grace with God.”

2. Spelled with two Ls, as they’re British.