The Swamp

Everyone gets one vote. Highest cumulative total wins. Voting closes end of business on Friday. Go.

I like the churchy ones, especially sung in foreign languages.

So, Adeste Fideles or Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht.

There's only one answer...

I have too many I enjoy. I might just wait and jump in if something I really like needs a push over the top on Friday.

Also...


*edited to remove media tags

I'm definitely with the resident Emerald Citizen. Everything else is gunning for #2.

doublepost...

BSF21 wrote:

This / any version of "Carol of the Bells"

Not exactly this version, but why not...

Steve of phpBB wrote:I like the churchy ones, especially sung in foreign languages.

So, Adeste Fideles or Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht.

I do too. I think we talked about this before. The more Jesus-y ones tend to derive from really epic musical compositions.

rass wrote:Also...

I'm double-crying over here!

Merry Christmas, Darling - Carpenters

A_B wrote:

rass wrote:Also...

I'm double-crying over here!

Is "White Christmas" just a mistake or is there some subtle-ass Rass/AB joke that I'm missing?

Gets me every time.

Pruitt wrote:

Gets me every time.

EVERY.TIME.

govmentchedda wrote:

Pruitt wrote: Gets me every time.

EVERY.TIME.

Here's the story of the song...

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/d ... mas-anthem

Pruitt wrote:

govmentchedda wrote:

Pruitt wrote: Gets me every time.

EVERY.TIME.

Here's the story of the song...

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/d ... mas-anthem

And can we trust the narrator anyway? "The guy is a bum who is living on the street," says MacGowan. "And he's just won on a horse at the unlikely odds of 18-to-one, so you're not even sure he is telling the truth." He says that both characters are versions of himself. "I identified with the man because I was a hustler and I identified with the woman because I was a heavy drinker and a singer. I have been in hospitals on morphine drips, and I have been in drunk tanks on Christmas Eve."

Jerloma wrote:

A_B wrote:

rass wrote:Also...

I'm double-crying over here!

Is "White Christmas" just a mistake or is there some subtle-ass Rass/AB joke that I'm missing?

I think did it on purpose, though the joke is lost on me at this point, too.

govmentchedda wrote:

Pruitt wrote:

Gets me every time.

EVERY.TIME.

A little ambiguous, here. Is this a vote or not?

or

See, this is why we can't have nice things.

Another vote for Adeste Fideles/O Come All Ye Faithful.

Also, every Christmas song written since 1970 blows and media companies trying to shoehorn them into the traditional canon makes me want to punch a reindeer.

Jerloma wrote:

govmentchedda wrote:

Pruitt wrote:

Gets me every time.

EVERY.TIME.

A little ambiguous, here. Is this a vote or not?

Yes. Fairytale of New York is my favorite Christmas song.

A Beer…in a tree.



and the b-side: It's Hard to be a Jew on Christmas

This is the only other way I know how to answer this since SanCarlos beat me to the post

So, tell us a bit about yourself, Enoch.

DaveInSeattle wrote:There's only one answer...

Bingo. We have a winner.

EnochRoot wrote:This is the only other way I know how to answer this since SanCarlos beat me to the post

My god that's funny!

Certainly something off this hot album

" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Pruitt wrote:

EnochRoot wrote:This is the only other way I know how to answer this since SanCarlos beat me to the post

My god that's funny!

That one is great. Added it to my spotify playlist for the holidays. This is probably the kids favorite...

If you are looking for some new christmas music, can't go wrong with Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings new release:





There's even a Hanukkah song for our Hebrew friends!

I'm pretty sure that O Little Town of Methlehem off of Gunpowder Jones forthcoming Christmas mixtape Jizz The Season will be hot fire.

Did the voting really close, because I gotta say that I wouldn't ever up and leave the Swamp for any reason but The Christmas Song kinda blows.

Ryan wrote:Did the voting really close, because I gotta say that I wouldn't ever up and leave the Swamp for any reason but The Christmas Song kinda blows.

Did that get 3? I thought we had a tie between that, Christmas in NY, and Adeste Fideles.

With so many across the pond, this is really meaningful, too.

For me, Nat King Cole is The Man on this one. Pure sentiment breaks the tie. But two other Christmas tunes are right up there.

There are so many bad versions of this song. They'll never stop coming. I have no idea why they embarrass themselves when this existed long ago now.




Coltrane et al. come at the Christmas thing from a slightly different angle. I think the baby Jesus would have dug it.

DC47 wrote:
Coltrane et al. come at the Christmas thing from a slightly different angle. I think the baby Jesus would have dug it.

I have a hard time getting into the Christmas spirit. I guess its from having my birthday so close and having to share the festivities as kid, and then my parents getting divorced when I was pretty young. My dad was a minister so it was his busy time of the year, and then my mom's partner is a PA and worked on Christmas day (time and a half!) so I rarely celebrated on the 25th and it just seemed more of a shitshow doing family things.

My wife has always had the xmas spirit and is trying to do special things for the kid, so she's been cranking the seasonal tunes each night via Pandora. I'm not a big fan of any of the new shit, and have heard the classics too many times to give a shit. I do dig the jazz interpretations though and have casually adding more it to the Pandora "request" list.

That's a lot of Christmas baggage to overcome. Having to listen to the fluff that passes for Christmas music is even more.

I've got a big collection of jazz renditions of Christmas tunes. They gradually accreted on cassette tapes, a few cuts at a time. I don't play them much; some years hardly at all as we're out of town around Christmas.

But one time they do come out is at our traditional New Years' Day party. It's a big one. It typically goes on for 6 to 10 hours, with 100 people or so stopping by. I drop my jazz Christmas cassettes in the player and set it on auto reverse. I've got a few folk, pop/rock and gospel (e.g., Mahalia) Christmas cassettes as well. That's the party sound track. My wife turns it down to inaudible unless you're leaning against a speaker. I turn it back up. I feel justified, as it's only audible in one room and it's the only time during the year when I mildly impose my musical tastes on family members. I also spin some Bach, Roberts & Barrand, and the Mormons for her benefit.

Jazz Christmas is of course intrinsically superior from a musical point of view. But it also can have positive non-musical spin-offs.

At one point in the party a few years ago, I was trying to talk with the rather submerged father of one of my daughter's more troubled (e.g., multiple trips to the psych ward) friends, who I didn't know at all. It wasn't going so well. I kept at it because I knew this would be important to my daughter for some specific reasons. Short answers, silences. Not much connection.

Suddenly he lit up.

"Dexter Gordon!"

I'll be damned if this seemingly Asbergian electrical engineer from Alabama wasn't a fan of 50s jazz. No one else at this party would have recognized that sax sound on a Christmas tune as long-ago Dexter. Now we had a starting point for our relationship. We actually found considerable common ground (e.g., we were both trombonists), and have been friendly ever since. That's been a good thing, as we've dealt with my daughter's (unwelcome) police call re: suicide that led them to go to his house late one night and his daughter's couch surfing and request to move in with us.