Merry and Bright: Tell Us What You’re Listening to this Holiday

This year at The Tyee, we’ve been celebrating the holidays early and often.

Since our holiday party at the beginning of the month, we have been treating each other to seasonal sweetness in every form it takes — a collective, festive response, perhaps, to the year it’s been.

Staff reporter Katie Hyslop left a trove of their signature marzipan-chocolate cherries in our office fridge before heading home for the holidays, and Christopher Cheung graced us with his homemade caramels this week. Our Vancouver team wrapped this week with an annual field trip for Turducken in Gastown. Those, like me, who are a little afraid of this three-bird roast are fans of the café’s stellar grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup.

To me, this has all been a welcome effort to bring some sparkle to the season, and maybe readers are recognizing similar moves to do the same in their own lives. Lately, I’ve been clawing my way out of an annual December dip in mental health, with lots of help from music.

The frosty reflectiveness of this time of year makes me nostalgic for the punk I enjoyed in my youth, so lately, I’ve been walking to work listening to an excellent hardcore outfit from Sydney, Australia called Speed, who released an LP called Only One Mode this spring through Flatspot Records. The first track of the LP, “Real Life Love,” has been the cathartic noise I’ve needed to do the ordinary stuff of my life, like walking back down the hill from school drop-off.

Punk rock aside, I’ll never turn down a chance to revel in the weightless sparkle of “Skating” by the American jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi. With affection and style, his jazz trio scored the soundtrack to the 1965 seasonal classic A Charlie Brown Christmas, a favourite childhood movie of mine and an album that reminds me of my family when I was growing up.

Last year, the Tyee’s operations manager Kimberly Sayson assembled a holiday playlist consisting of Tyee staff’s favourite songs to take us through the season.

This year, we’ve compiled more staff picks for you to take wassailing — or to a warm, cozy corner just for you.

What are you listening to this holiday season? Let us know in the comments.

— Jackie Wong

'So Much Wine' by Phoebe Bridgers

I'm not an avid Phoebe Bridgers listener — or an avid Christmas music listener, for that matter. But for three years now, I’ve listened to the singer-songwriter’s 2022 Christmas EP So Much Wine in the leadup to Christmas. An amalgamation of covers, Bridgers’s rendition on a mix of genres can transmute anyone’s complicated emotions around the holidays.

Her hauntingly stunning “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” makes me want to cozy up with a glass of red, watch flurries fall and think about the passage of time. “7 O’Clock News / Silent Night” featuring Fiona Apple and Matt Berninger makes me feel like I’m stuck in traffic on a wet winter night, listening to the harsh news of the modern world, but soon coming home to blankets and hot chocolate.

And “If We Make It Through December” serves as a gentle admission that Christmas isn’t jolly for everyone, as its capitalistic transformation can cause the average working-class person stress, guilt and shame.

Between the consumerism of November and the hustling of January, Bridgers’s melancholy allows us to slow down for a moment of December reprieve.

Once I’ve indulged in enough bittersweet sadness for one holiday season, Wham’s “Last Christmas” and Justin Bieber’s “Mistletoe” are cued up and ready to go.

— Sarah Krichel

‘Christmas As I Knew It’ by Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash recorded a lot of Christmas music, much of it cheesy, religious and sentimental — and I love a lot of those songs.

But one of my favourite Cash songs is his spoken word recollection “Christmas As I Knew It.” The song captures the melancholy of Christmas as a mark of the passage of time, as Cash reflects on what made Christmas special as a child growing up in poverty in Arkansas.

He relates how his mother worked hard to make Christmas special for all the children, and how she noticed a neighbour was even less fortunate, sending Cash and his brother to give a gift of “coal oil and some hickernuts” to the “poor old ragged lady.”

Yes, this song is cheesy and sentimental, and there are parts that make me laugh, like the line “Daddy killed a squirrel” (just how big are squirrels in the southern United States?!).

But the last line of the song always gets me: “Daddy put on his gum boots / Waited for the thaw / Back home in Dyess, Arkansas.” For the family, Christmas is a brief and “heaven-sent” respite from the endless labour of trying to survive.

There’s a special genre of Christmas songs that describe how a particular family celebrates the season, often revealing regional or class differences, but reminding us that gathering with loved ones is universal.

I’ll also give a shout out to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “It’s Not Christmas Till Somebody Cries” for its bang-on depiction of West Coast Christmas madness, complete with edibles and a vegan boyfriend, and to Run DMC’s “Christmas in Hollis” with its heartwarming description of “mom’s cookin’ chicken and collard greens / Rice and stuffing, macaroni and cheese.”

— Jen St. Denis

'Now the Bells Ring' by Rita MacNeil

Until I got steel-string guitar icon John Fahey’s Christmas album The New Possibility in my 20s, there were really only two Christmas albums growing up. A Very Special Christmas, a middling but somewhat household ’80s compilation of big-name pop stars with iconic cover art by New York graffiti artist Keith Haring, and Rita MacNeil’s Now the Bells Ring.

MacNeil's is really the only album that ever saw any rotation. I was amused to find it for $8 at a local record store four years ago, but decided not to buy it until finally committing to the same dusty copy a year later. It was shortly after I returned from a December visit to see my sister in the U.K., where we melted into childhood versions of ourselves putting up the tree and graced her husband and his brother with our full improvisational dance sequence to "Now the Bells Ring."

From the intro of honking car horns in some imaginary city I imagine to be New York, to the anthemic intro of church organ and the ’80s twinkling synthesizer sequence, to the grandiose chorus crescendo, it’s all held together by MacNeil’s voice. And she is a powerhouse.

— Tara Campbell

'Honky the Christmas Goose' by Johnny Bower

It’s time more attention was paid to the ultimate Canadian holiday song — Honky the Christmas Goose.

It was sung, sort of, by Johnny Bower, then the Toronto Maple Leafs goalie, and a ragtag choir of kids in 1965. Bower mostly bounced around the minor leagues until he was 33 and landed with the Leafs, playing until he was 44. (The minor league stint included a year with the Vancouver Canucks.)

That was when goalies were quirky, popular figures in flimsy pads and no masks. Games paused when they got hit in the face with the puck so training staff could stitch them up.

Honky wears its status as a novelty tune proudly. It raised money for charity and hit 29 on the Chum Chart, the weekly bible for Toronto teens. (The Beatles had the top spot that week with “Day Tripper” and “We Can Work it Out.”)

Please. Listen to Honky.

— Paul Willcocks

‘Put the Lights on the Tree’ by Sufjan Stevens

I’ve already written about my deeply personal connection to The McGarrigle Christmas Hour, so let’s pivot to another collection of seasonal songs from the early 2000s, when I was clearly at my most impressionable.

I’ve got love for plenty of old-timey classics, but looking back, a lot of my favourite holiday albums come from the early aughts: the McGarrigle joint that I mentioned above, Hawksley Workman’s Almost a Full Moon, and the one that seems likeliest to stand the test of time: Sufjan Stevens’ wildly precocious, weirdly Christian, decade-spanning Songs for Christmas.

I’m especially partial to “Put the Lights on the Tree,” the call-and-response-heavy single released in 2006 with the five-CD box set that gathered the first five of 10 Christmas EPs and 100 Christmas songs recorded by Stevens so far.

Each volume, described by Stevens as “the search for existential significance in all that sentimental oatmeal,” is a strange collection of hymns, Christmas carols and original tracks with typically twee titles like “It’s Christmas! Let’s Be Glad!,” “Did I Make You Cry on Christmas? (Well, You Deserved It!)” and “Come On! Let’s Boogey to the Elf Dance!”

Don’t let the excessive exclamation marks mislead you. There isn’t a hint of irony to be found in any of these volumes, originally recorded as gifts for Stevens’ friends and family. The singer/songwriter simply adores Christmastime, and it’s hard not to find yourself caught up in his earnest, optimistic but somehow depressed yuletide catalogue.

For seasonal sad boys who came of age just after Y2K, it doesn’t get better than this.

— Harrison Mooney

The King’s Singers’ 'A Little Christmas Music'

My love for this album has grown and changed as I have. When I was small, the goofy rendition of “Jingle Bells” (off-key singing! Opera! Kazoos!) was like kid catnip.

But A Little Christmas Music has its share of melancholy, “in the bleak midwinter” style tracks that perfectly capture the joy/despair dichotomy of the season: “The Coventry Carol,” “Patapan and Farandole” and the “Three Spanish Carols” give me goosebumps every time.

Christmases in Newfoundland could be white or brown, but they were always foggy and grey. This album brings me back there every time.

Perhaps that’s why my husband, who refers to this album as my “emo” Christmas music, prefers I play A Little Christmas Music through earbuds only.

— Katie Hyslop

‘Song for a Winter’s Night’ by Sarah McLachlan

There is, perhaps, no greater seasonal Canadian classic than the one written by the nation’s folk legend and perfected by one of its pop icons.

“Song for a Winter’s Night” entered my life in the fall of 1997. It appeared one day on a mix tape in my post office box, back when music travelled by such means, sent by my boyfriend 3,500 kilometres away. It was my first winter living in the mountains and I was alone.

The song enveloped me like a warm blanket. In under four minutes, it takes the listener through a night spent pining for unrequited love. I could almost smell the woodsmoke and taste the whisky. I could see the sun break over that windowpane, “where webs of snow are drifting.”

“If I could only have you near to breathe a sigh or two,” the song laments, “I would be happy just to hold the hands I love on this winter night with you.”

Only later did I learn those lyrics were written 30 years earlier by Gordon Lightfoot. But Lightfoot’s version, with its tinny guitar chords, is jarringly upbeat for someone engaged in an all-night, self-pitying bender.

It took Sarah McLachlan to help the song find its pace, to render the listener helpless to her crooning vocals and haunting arrangement, as if the only possible response is to curl up under a blanket and wait for spring. It was that version that found me that winter far from home.

I don’t know what happened to that boyfriend. But the song forever lives on my Christmas playlist.

— Amanda Follett Hosgood

My kingdom for a crackling fireplace

If that sounds generic, it is. In an attempt to mask my general "bah humbug" approach to the holidays, mostly for my seven-year-old’s sake, we now decorate our house with a garland and a string of lights and a little ceramic tree and some homemade embroidered bunting.

This was what I found on YouTube to accompany the decorating process, and it’s been playing daily at our house ever since because my child loves it, and I don’t hate it.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

— andrea bennett

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What songs are bringing you comfort and joy this season? Listen to the Tyee's holiday hits on YouTube and tell us your favourites in the comments.