Christmas carols have always been an important part of the holiday season. They have the power to fill our hearts with festive glee and clog up the airwaves, as well as to become a total nuisance. Nevertheless, we never manage to hate them really deeply to-the-core or get rid of them altogether. There’s some strange alchemical formula, a penchant that the western world has for poppy get-together hymns that somehow undermines our capacity to be overly critical of all the chart-blasting tunes the industry sends our way as the festivities draw closer.
I always think about Nick Hornby’s 1998 novel About a Boy, where the main char- acter lives off the royalties of a Yuletide hit his father has written. Or the fact that this year we celebrate 30 years of the best-selling classic ‘We Are The World’, unfor- gotten in its charitable purpose and supergroup allure. Decades shed like melting snow from these evergreen classics; we still hum ‘White Christmas’, around since 1940, not to mention the 1857 classic ‘Jingle Bells’. In the music world, the Christ- mas carol is truly a category of its own.
In a near-December frenzy, as The Florentine’s music editor, I whipped up a playlist of my personal tinsel-touched heartwarmers and gut-wrenchers. Enjoy!
