Low – Just Like Christmas
As festive bangers go, Low’s Just Like Christmas is the sparkly stocking with a lump of coal inside. I first heard it on Xfm’s It’s A Cool Cool Christmas compilation in 2000, a chilly collection of indie holiday songs by bands such as Grandaddy, Eels, The Flaming Lips, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Snow Patrol when they were great (yes, they used to be great).
It first appeared on Low’s 1999 Christmas album – the kind you’ll never hear during your seeing-as-it’s-a-special-occasion M&S food shop – where it was a jingly-jangly jewel in an otherwise typically morose trove. Three, lean, bouncy minutes of 60s-styled pop, it brims with the sweet feeling of going back home for the holidays with the promise of snow and of sleeping in small beds that make you instantly regress to being young. This being Low, though, the anticipation is offset by bittersweet realisation. Mimi Parker’s calm and collected voice is resigned to the fact that the snow has melted and therefore: “It wasn’t like Christmas at all.” The ominous, cavernous bass drum booms, like storm clouds breaking.
Despite the incessant sleigh bells, it’s the only seasonal song you can play more than three times in a row without your chest tightening. Perhaps that’s because it offers both light and shade: a Christmas song for the optimistic among us who deep down know that the holiday season will always disappoint. Kate Hutchinson
Kiki and Herb – Like a Snowman
There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of Christmas song. One is about an illusion of Christmas, the construction of an appealing fantasy, a three-minute suspension of disbelief. The skill is in getting your audience to collude with it, a tough call: for every song that temporarily convinces listeners that they wish it could be Christmas every day, there are dozens that fill you with a desire to render yourself comatose with alcohol until the festive season is over and people stop playing them. The other is more rooted in reality, the knowledge that things never really turn out the way Wizzard and Slade keep telling you they will, the kind of thing that isn’t interested in rousing the rabble but providing a consoling hug when you’re in your cups. They’re just as hard to get right. It’s not a matter of writing something miserable with sleigh bells on it: the emotions Christmas evokes are more complex than that.
My favourite is Like a Snowman, written by Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields, recorded first by New York drag duo Kiki And Herb – who had already made a Christmas album, notable for containing a medley of Frosty the Snowman and Suicide is Painless – then by Tracey Thorn on her 2012 album Tinsel and Lights.
It’s not just the lovely, sighing melody – the descending piano chords have something of Vince Guaraldi’s beautiful soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas – but the way its emotional temperature keeps veering between wallowing in melancholy and advocating gleeful drunken abandon. No other time of year brings out people’s capacity for both boozy recklessness and rueful reflection – the latter often following on the heels of the former: Like A Snowman captures it perfectly. Alexis Petridis
The Watersons – Sound, Sound Your Instruments of Joy
Two types of Christmas music tower above all others: classic soul and folk, and for the same reasons. Both treat Christmas not as a chance to spend money, get drunker than usual and stuff your face. Instead, in both the soul music of the early 70s and the English folk songs that have been revived across a series of albums, you get songs that paint Christmas as a different sort of time – one when families and communities try to put hardship aside for a brief while and find something – anything – to celebrate.
The unaccompanied voices of the Watersons capture this version of Christmas across several albums. At times, admittedly, it veers a little close to self-parody (a friend once drew up a list of spoof titles for Watersons Christmas records, concluding with Christmas Night in the Workhouse, During the Cholera Epidemic, When Both Your Parents Have Syphilis), but on Christmas morning, it’s bracing to hear their sternness instead of the ever present jingling of sleighbells across the modern Christmas classics. But I do love Christmas, so my favourites of theirs involve some element of joy. Or, at the very least, no one dying.
Sound, Sound Your Instruments of Joy is an 18th-century Christmas hymn, one that survived in Devon and Cornwall, picked up by the Watersons from a 1934 BBC recording of a male voice choir from Penryn. In their overlapping and intertwining voices you can hear the sound of Christmases from the time when every village had its own celebrations, distinct and individual. You can hear a joy that is unforced, the result of people coming together, rather than it being forced by diktat. Michael Hann
Wham! – Last Christmas
It is hardly surprising that I grew up hating Wham!’s Christmas hit. Anyone who has ever worked long shifts in a supermarket over the festive period, with the instore FM pumping out the same half dozen songs on repeat, will have developed a gag reflex for anything involving sleigh bells or Noddy Holder. Imagine my surprise, then, when at some point in the early 00s, I found myself at London club night Trash’s Christmas party, with DJ Erol Alkan taking the mic to announce: “I’m going to end with what is still the greatest Christmas song ever written,” before cuing up George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s number.
Was he serious? Was I in an “enlightened” enough state to enjoy this? It turned out that, yes, I was. Not only did the song’s outer-cheese dissolve to let the soulful hooks shine through (“You gaaaaaave it away”), but the lyrics struck a real chord: the year before I had indeed been dumped over Christmas, a truly gut-wrenching experience, whereas this time around I’d been lucky enough to give my heart to “someone special” instead. It was the very definition of a dancefloor epiphany. And unlike most epiphanies that happen around 3am, I didn’t wake up the next day and think: “Oh dear, what a load of old bollocks.” Instead, I played it over and over and marvelled at the simple melancholic chord changes, the aching vocal peaks, and the small note of hope that stops it becoming too bleak. It has since joined The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York and Low’s Just Like Christmas as one of my favourite festive songs, and one that’s no longer just for Christmas. Tim Jonze
The Waitresses – Christmas Wrapping
Stress, pressure, panic: the fraught three words Chris Butler of the Waitresses used to describe the fruition of their snarky, sleeper-hit success. Created for a Christmas album that their Ze label boss had strong-armed them into, Christmas Wrapping was penned at the height of summer. The Ohio post-punk band were frazzled from months on the road and jaded by the impenetrable nature of the mainstream music scene: its context contains so much weariness that their reluctance is almost palpable on this excellently apathetic anthem. Amid the theatrical cries of heartache and fusty, traditional narratives, this 1982 classic is unique in its utter indifference to the Yuletide period. Perhaps that’s why it took a decade for it to weave itself into the collective Christmas consciousness: after originally peaking at No 45, The Best Christmas … Ever! compilation in 1996 resurrected its five minutes of downbeat funk for those worn down by the rest of the Christmas charts (but best avoid the garish Spice Girls’ cover, which bizarrely omits Tracy Wormworth’s brilliantly burly bassline).
A song about spending the holiday alone, Christmas Wrapping is the ultimate in aloof cool: Patty Donahue’s deadpan vocals pre-date the disenchanted festive comments that fill our Twitter timelines in 2015. It is not all doom, though: to temper the nonchalance of the majority of its lyrics, the band interwove a love story, one that ends positively. Such is its contemporary feel for unvarnished indifference, you almost imagine its protagonist sacking off her trip for cranberry sauce and Whatsapping the words “Netflix and chill” to her most recent Tinder match. Harriet Gibsone
Mariah Carey – All I Want for Christmas is You
All I Want for Christmas is You seems to represent the worst of the festive season. It ticks so many offending boxes: schmaltzy sleigh bells, a 60s girl group-imitating style, the sort of head-bopping tempo that makes people clap on the one and three. But I love it. It conceals a sense of crushing despair in what sounds like suffocating sentimentality – and that niggling sadness is a more realistic version of Christmas than perfectly snowy front gardens and piles of presents. This is a song about loneliness. Carey starts off optimistically, willing to trade presents for the only gift she wants: time with the one she loves. Judging by the state of affairs after the bridge, he never comes. “I don’t want a lot for Christmas/This is all I’m asking for/I just want to see my baby/standing right outside my door,” she sings, more a jilted lover than the smiling snow bunny we see in the video. This song is my Christmas-time favourite because it cements Carey’s place as one of pop’s prominent “sad girls”. As she pulled away from ex-husband and record label executive Tommy Mottola’s grasp in her 20s, Carey filled her music with a melancholy no doubt linked to her difficult childhood. You can hear it here, just as you can on songs such as Looking In, Petals and Outside. All I Want ends without a resolution, with Carey still waiting for that special someone. It may sound corny, but take a closer look and it’s teeming with sorrow. Festive, no? Tshepo Mokoena
Slade – Merry Xmas Everybody
Merry Xmas Everybody was one of the three first singles I ever owned (along with Gary Glitter and T Rex 45s), all of which I got for Christmas 1973 along with the Fidelity UA4 record player on which to play them. I’m hardly the only person to hail Slade’s stomping classic as the greatest festive single ever. It has everything, from those instantly recognisable opening chords to lyrics (“Does your granny always tell you that the old songs are the best? Then she’s up and rock’n’rolling with the rest”), which sum up many families’ Christmas. When I met Noddy Holder recently, which felt as magical as meeting Father Christmas, he told me it was based on a song he had written in 1967, Buy Me a Rocking Chair, which went in the bin when the band declared it “shit”. After rediscovering and reworking it, they recorded Merry Xmas Everybody following the car crash that nearly killed drummer Don Powell – he’d lost his memory and had to record the drum parts piece by piece. I went scurrying to listen to it again and it sounds as glorious now as it did to a small child 42 years ago. Merry Christmas Everybody. Merry Christmas Slade. Dave Simpson
