Part of the 2020 good-times advent calendar! If you have ideas, and/or would like to see something fun drawn into the advent calendar, please let me know. Comment below or email/WhatsApp me and let’s have fun this next few weeks.
Get ready for a hot take: Christmas music can be cloying, intrusive, and the ubiquity of it doesn’t make it feel that special. As soon as ‘Monster Mash’ is off the radio and out of stores, in comes ‘All I want for Christmas is you’ and it plays for 12 weeks straight. I think Christmas music would be more special if it were constrained to a smaller time frame, but also some of it is just too much at any time. Christmas music needs to stop being so extra and find some chill.
But! I do like the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s chill jazz takes on the Charlie Brown Christmas album. I don’t even really like most of the old-school CBS peanuts special, except for the part where they all dance at the end. The album and the gif are enough for me, without narrating childhood existential crisis. Luckily, the music is uncommon enough that I don’t hear very often out in the wild, which means it stays special for those times I am making Christmas cookies or writing Christmas blogs.