Because I didn’t post much this week…

I thought I’d do a rare Sunday post. It’s clear and beautiful here in a so-far-dry late autumn/early winter kind of way. Even the snow flurries at the beginning of the week and the snow squalls on Friday left no lasting traces. Much like my Christmas planning so far: we have a photo and text but no card yet. (Tomorrow.) And I still don’t know if our Christmas tree will light up after this spring’s flood.

But the holiday recordings are out! Well, technically, I didn’t have to pull anything out from anywhere. In the pre-iTunes days, around the first of December I would pull all my Christmas CDs out from the back of the drawer and replace them with the world music CDs, not from any animosity to Afropop but because they were filed right in front of the Christmas discs. This year, all I did was go into iTunes, select the Holiday genre, and command-click to check them all for inclusion in the normal shuffle. Then Lisa and I listened to hours worth of Christmas recordings yesterday, from the Stax Christmas collection and the Blind Boys of Alabama in the morning to the new Sufjan Stevens Christmas box (which rocks, btw) as we made spaghetti amatriciana last night.

So in honor of the season, here’s a random playlist of holiday music for your ass:

  1. Bootsy Collins, “Boot-Off (aka Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer)” (Christmas is 4 Ever)
  2. Cathedral Choral Society (J. Reilly Lewis, cond.), “Hallelujah Chorus” (The Joy of Christmas)
  3. Ella Fitzgerald, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas)
  4. Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge (Christopher Robinson, cond.), “The Lord’s Prayer” (John Tavener, composer) (Christmas Proclamation)
  5. Boston Camerata, “Gaudete, gaudete” (A Renaissance Christmas)
  6. New York Ensemble for Early Music, “Orientis partibus” (Nova: A Medieval Christmas)
  7. John Denver and the Muppets, “Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913” (A Christmas Together)
  8. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, “Joy to the World” (It’s Christmas)
  9. Anonymous 4, “Liber generationis” (A Star in the East)
  10. The Sixteen (Harry Christophers, cond.), “Drive the Cold Winter Away” (An Early English Christmas)