What Holiday Music Do You Actually Like?
There’s gotta be at least one song that doesn’t make you want to die.
Earlier this week, I looked at the Billboard Hot 100 for work purposes, and though I knew what was coming, I was nevertheless taken aback. Beyond Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” shooting back to No. 1 (correct choice, though everyone should be bumping the So So Def Remix instead), the Top 10 is presently a knife-fight between songs from Kendrick Lamar’s GNX and Christmas classics, pitting “TV Off” against “Jingle Bell Rock.” At No. 9, Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga’s slipping “Die With a Smile” is barely squeaking by “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” a 60-year-old single by an Illinois freemason with a pipe, may Burl Ives rest in peace.
The charts are notoriously wild-westing in the streaming era, but damn, y’all love Christmas music, don’t you! I’m thinking about all the Duane Reade managers cranking the Pandora Holiday station into the make-up aisle while I scrounge in the back of the rack for the last mascara in Hunty Black. In this week’s edition of our podcast, Waste or Taste, host and holiday-music hater Jill Mapes asked our colleagues Ryan Dombal and Dylan Green to talk about their own favorite holiday songs—give it a listen to hear what they chose. (Nobody asked me but the correct answer is clearly Donny Hathaway’s “This Christmas.”)
The classics are gonna classic, but this annual Christmas music boom strikes me as a missed opportunity to get a little outré, so I was pleased this week when Victoria Monét released the Christmas album I didn’t know I needed: A Jaguar II Christmas: The Orchestral Arrangements. It’s mostly orchestral interpolations of songs from her Grammy-winning (and excellent) 2023 album, Jaguar II. So, for instance, “Cadillac (A Pimp’s Anthem)” gets reworked into “Cadillac Christmas” featuring melodies from “The Little Drummer Boy” and “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy,” effectively positing Santa Claus as a badman. (I mean, he is a serial home invader.) And I learned that “On My Mama,” Jaguar II’s anthemic single, sounds pretty great with a string section and bells weaving “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” and “The Twelve Days of Christmas” into its humid Southern sub-bass. The album is weird and delectable and immediately made me want to throw the yule log on the television—much better than the Mannheim Steamroller Christmas CDs my stepmom used to blast on the stereo. Shout to Mannheim Steamroller, though, this shit is a bop.
And so, to acknowledge that a fuckton of people are playing holiday tunes at the moment, we wanna know: What’s your fave? The weirder the better.
