Oh Blimey, It's Obscure Yuletide Music Season

You have two chances in the next week to see Jingle Bell Rocks! on the big screen in Vancouver. Mitchell Kezin's film deservedly took the Best Documentary award at the Whistler Film Festival last weekend, and it comes to the Vancity Theatre on Monday (Dec. 16) before playing at The Rio the following night.

Kezin has been an obsessive collector of Christmas records since the '80s, and Jingle Bell Rocks! gives us the Vancouverite's origin story. With an absent dad, his attachment to Nat King Cole's radiant "The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot" spoke directly to him as a child, presenting an unusually concrete motivation in this case for the collector's impulse. The film simultaneously winds through a dozen of his other favourites.

Chief among these is Jingle Bell Jazz, a 1962 album featuring Miles Davis in collaboration with the composer and vocalist Bob Dorough (who later wrote much of Schoolhouse Rock). Kezin tracks down Dorough, a drawling and amiable Texan who was unexpectedly commissioned by the Prince of Darkness to write a Christmas song. Not a bad idea, as the film points out, since seasonal records were solid gold royalty generators.

Coming some 20 years after Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," Davis and Dorough turned up a wickedly unsentimental track called "Blue Xmas (To Whom it May Concern)." Like the rest of the mostly obscure nuggets he examines in Jingle Bell Rocks!, the back story is fascinating. Once Kezin starts to dig, the kitsch value of an item like 1973's "Santa Claus Is a Black Man" -- a John Waters favourite -- gives way to something of much greater value, and astute commentators like Waters, David Wisdom, Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips and musicologist Irwin Chusid show up to explain why. The film meanwhile reminds us that ritual, repetition, and familiarity give the season a sustaining emotional payload that's easy to overlook.

In other words, from one Christmas cynic to another, don't miss it. Until then, I have my own Christmas obscurity to share. Frank Sidebottom was an '80s-vintage British cabaret act; a lanky permanent infant with a huge paper mache head who would mangle popular songs in a style somewhere in the vicinity of George Formby. It was inspired madness, and indelibly weird and legendary enough for some of us that -- three years after his death -- Michael Fassbender is playing Sidebottom in an upcoming film written by Jon Ronson.

His 1985 E.P. Oh Blimey It's Christmas became a staple at my house, reliably delighting me and my brother and just as reliably annoying the figgy pudding out of my parents. Now I bug my own kids with it, and I'll continue to bug my own kids with it, year after year, until they move out. Because it's true; tradition really is important.