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Christmas in July!

photo: July 1, 2025

Twenty-five years ago, I was groovin' to Noonday Underground.

This past holiday season, they dropped an album full of originals down the chimney just a few days before Santa. Not a release schedule I endorse, but it does provide some time to find a record's groove. So here in July, I'm ready.

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No qusestions, just a huge THANK YOU for this huge and hugely enjoyable Christmas music history. Wishing you and yours a wonderful holiday.

Thanks for stopping by! I assume your handle is about the fabulous Nina Simone; I'm going to post a song by her RIGHT NOW. Really appreciate your note. Merry Christmas!

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deep and crisp and even

The Feast of Stephen is still two days off, but in 1959 Miss Nina Simone dovetailed Rogers & Hart's "Little Girl Blue" with a 13th century melody (later given a lyric about a 10th century Bohemian saint who was not a king) and it's a nice thing to contemplate eleven hundred years of history on Christmas Eve.

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Christmas Is Just a Very Long Night

Christmas Eve insomnia is a tradition worthy of a playlist.

Amazon doesn't embed well on Tumblr, but click on the too-big-to-bother widget below to buy/stream Flash Gordon, a 2005 Brit-pop song by Baxendale: essential to today's theme. (Also on Spotify and Apple Music.)

Yuletide mainstay Christmas Aguilera captures the bleary-eyed joy:

You may prefer to blame your insomnia on a mythical being.

Carter Moulton's video of his 2011 "Walking in the Air" (the ultimate Christmas insomniac's fantasy) includes animation from The Snowman and doesn't suck (once you get past Bowie's cringe intro).

21st-century classic with the hot take we all needed:

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It's Coming!

Alton Ellis's 1969 "Sunday Coming" had a Christmas version.

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Seeing Ships, Hearing Bells

Jacob Collier's spunky bedroom-pop arrangement of the 17th century folk carol captures the pure joy unfettered talent can bring.

Bearing further witness with the senses, this recording from Anaïs Mitchell and Thomas "Doveman" Bartlett retains Longfellow's Civil War lyric but deconstructs Johnny Marks's melody in just the right way. The instrumental brings out Doveman's contribution.

Christmas on your tongue, from 2015.

Maxwell Farrington's spine-tingling vocal brings home the sensual thrill of love in winter.

In 2008, Glasvegas helped us feel the texture of Christmas.

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Humbug Boogie

I collect offbeat Christmas music. Alt.Xmas is my term for the stuff that’s not commercial, pious, or overplayed. Not just new music, or music from my childhood, but the whole history of recorded Christmas music.

Especially old music: 30s swing, 50s R&B, 70s top 40. I also love genre-defying one-off 45s that some kid played in his room while the family was downstairs watching the game. My tastes are way eclectic: Christmas music can be a great entry point to bluegrass, gospel, classic blues, dancehall.

Because the audience for Alt.Xmas is so small special, and fans of its entire history a minuscule fraction of that, my annual Christmas mix became something of a White Elephant. In the streaming age, better to provide a resource for the intrepid and let you make your own mix.

A few years ago, I sorted my collection into eras: 90s alternative, 70s-80s, early 60s, postwar, swing. It's a big old mess, but this omnibus mix, Humbug Boogie, has 500 songs from fifty-plus years of collecting music across all #theErasofAlt.Xmas. (Hit that tag to get the full overview of my subjective, ever-changing history of a full century of Christmas Music I Like.)

Youtube Music isn't exactly curator-friendly, but has more deep cuts. Hit shuffle, then like and skip to make your own Alt.Xmas playlist.

I'm duplicating it on Spotify but it's much shorter because Spotify.

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Snow Is Pretty

Southern hemisphere aside, snow makes for a Solstice topic that captures your gaze, slows you down, and doesn't usually overstay its welcome.

Manchester's I Am Kloot delivered this homage in 2001.

San Francisco theremin lounge band Project: Pimento have the perfect soundtrack for stumbling through the drifts.

Like a light snowfall, the 2016 French compilation Pop à Noël came and went with barely a trace.

(A later comp by this French digital-only series is on Bandcamp.)

Lorna have been producing great Christmas songs for twenty years.

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Why We’re Here

My birthday gift in 1965 was a reissue of Harry Simeone’s Little Drummer Boy (recorded 1959). Yeah, you hate me right now.

Not being a cool kid, I succumbed. I'd seen Sound of Music the previous summer, so it was fun when I discovered the original 1951 recording by no less than the Trapp Family Singers.

It’s hip to hate this song: one hook on endless loop, child labor, the humblebrag of Christian grace, onomatopoeia? Please.

Being shameless (obvs), I’m happy to fix this post now for the non-haters. Tap your poison.

Cheekyboy (Johnny Cash mashup)

And for Jim:

When Dean Wareham gave Marlene Dietrich's 1964 version a solid shoutout, it made my day.

Finally, a newish (2022) version by Jon Bell that works really well.

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Alt.Snowglobe

I often rail against the Mariah-Wham!Bing snowglobe, but without these tentpole mega-hits, Christmas music wouldn't be a thing, and the alt.universe in which I dwell would not exist.

I'm not a complete monster.

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Dead Letter Office

Among the other Christian things that got secularized in the 20th century, prayers became letters to Santa. Everyone needs a fixer.

After an off-Broadway stint as a Shirley Temple knockoff opposite Bernadette Peters, Bayn Johnson became a guitarist and singer on The Electric Company. Recorded between those two unforgettable gigs, this B-side to the nightmarish "Christmas Teddy Bear" is well worthy of its 82 seconds.

Before stints at él and in Shibuya-kei, renaissance man Louis Philippe made this sweet little record in 1981 as The Arcadians.

Eddy Howard quit Stanford med school to croon. From 1947.

Mr Little Jeans out of LA, charming AF in 2014.

For a while I assumed it was Carol Channing, but this forgotten rarity from 1958 is by former vaudeville stars The Duncan Sisters, whose only other claim to infamy was an ill-conceived stint in blackface.

Spoiler alert: The Fools just want a puppy.

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Y'know: Deck Them Halls and all that stuff?

The closest Deck the Halls comes to a Christmas reference is "yuletide" (gringo for "Solstice BC"). I can't find Alt.Xmas takes on this nerdy party banger from before the 1960s, a full century after English lyrics were added to a 16th Century Welsh song about New Year's Eve. Those lyrics were a bit too boozy for puritanical Americans, who instead started "donning gay apparel" when the song crossed over.

One-shot wonder Little Jimmy Thomas hit it out of the park in 1964:

Three years later, Chicago's Saturday's Children mashed it up with Dave Brubeck's huge jazz hit "Take Five."

Gaga's 2008 collaboration with Space Cowboy borrows today's theme melody and deserves a proper flashmob video. Picture echelon-formation choreography helping a few prudes grasp the full metaphorical significance of the title.

The Lumineers promise someday to release "the saddest Christmas album ever!" and I say bring it.

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Humbuggery

In 1930, this duo's playful bickering started a very long tradition of novelty Christmas records.

During the Musicians' Strike of 1942-44, Dolores Brown managed to record a winter elegy to straying love that we'll chalk up to Santa.

Props to Guinness World Record holder George Lee Andrews, who sang it in 1976 at Manhattan Theater Club, but the (demon) Mayor of Sunnydale brought a Scrooge-worthy grievance to this 1994 recording.

With upbeat irony, the Lathums remind us that Santa's often downplayed alter-ego is still very much a thing.

With a gorgeous melody and arrangement, this track from 2021 trawls the far side of Christmas and just barely manages to stumble back home on the final line.

Under Matt Pond's other moniker, he made this thrilling ballad in 2022, which I think of as celebrating all the long-suffering partners of Christmas music weirdos like me.

Way back in 2015, ridiculously prolific Freedom Fry gave us this festive morsel of yuletide side-eye.

Alfie Whitby made a Christmas song in 2017 that kinda nails it.

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Go Where I Send Thee

Gospel may not be your thing, but there are some canon-worthy Christmas recordings that show off its crucial influences on R&B.

Half-Pint Jaxon, a pocket gay of extraordinary range, recorded this in 1929. I'm not sure it entirely qualifies as gospel, but close enough for the purposes of Alt.Xmas.

The Golden Gate Jubilee Singers recorded this in 1937. The rhythmic harmonies show their staying power: They moved to Paris in 1959 and still perform.

When Was Jesus Born, Sons of Heaven, 1950

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, The Caravans, 1963

Go Tell It on the Mountain, Swan Silvertones, 1963 (stick with it for the rarely heard bridge).

More recently, the Blind Boys of Alabama made an album in 2003 on which they team up with various big names (Tom Waits, George Clinton, Chrissie Hynde, Solomon Burke) for an album of gospel and carol standards, with exceptional results. The highlight for me is Born in Bethlehem with gospel legend Mavis Staples.

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Crack Them Nuts

The Nutcracker, composed by Tchaikovsky in 1892, based on a E.T.A. Hoffmann story from 75 years before that, keeps ballet companies solvent, so its constant reinvention is no surprise. The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy popularized the celesta, used in countless Christmas songs since.

Nicholas Burgess makes lots of Christmas music, so we like him. Tends toward the creepy, even better.

Everett Bradley has a funky take to liven up your Christmas party.

From 1941, John Kirby, who'd played with Billie Holiday and the great Fletcher Henderson, and married Maxine Sullivan, made this hot little foxtrot that requires yet another kind of dancing.

Just before WWII, when he was still band leader at the Waldorf-Astoria, bringing Latin music to American radio, Xavier Cugat recorded a version of the reed flute and Arabian dances from the Nutcracker that makes me wish he'd done the entire suite.

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A Retail Therapy Christmas

Let's get real: Christmas is shopping. Then again, we shop all year, and Black Friday doesn't inspire groovy holiday tunes. Here are a few.

In 1931, Wayne King recorded a song Cass Elliot immortalized in 1968. But by 1963, King had evolved into someone who produced this soundtrack to a Christmas rom-com shopping montage. Being shamelessly, absurdly eclectic, I revel in this sugar-pop treat.

Busby Berkeley's The Gold Diggers of 1935 isn't about Christmas, but it distracted underemployed Americans from the prospect of moving into Hooverville. I nominate its theme song to the Foxtrot Christmas canon. Bandleader Hal Kemp and vocalist Skinnay Ennis deliver a punchy update on Dick Powell's bland movie version.

In 1966 Horace Williams gave us this Northern Soul gem.

If there were a five-and-dime that played Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, I might start shopping for Christmas myself. In fact, what's left of this 90s power pop band amounts to some pretty cool merch.

As Stubby can attest, Dunproofin’ covered this weirdness in 2016, but that recording has vanished. Here's the original from 1991.

Count on Les Bicyclettes de Belsize to provide solid musical craftsmanship for any oddball Christmas theme you choose.

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One-Horse Open Sleigh Me Now

Unless you're careful, catching the Christmas music bug means too much Jingle Fucking Bells. Written c. 1850, the song didn’t become a Christmas standard until the early 20th Century. With roots in minstrelsy, the Confederacy, and drunk driving, the song’s title refers to belling a dangerously quiet sleigh (because snow). Enduring as it has become, JB did not inspire many other secular yuletide tunes. That didn't happen until "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town" in 1934.

I've flipped and clicked past most versions, made my peace with it, purged the 100+ variations that sneak into my collection, found a rotating roster of keepers, sworn off it forever, and been amused all over again by some weirdo's fresh take. Don't hate.