Happy new year!

1. Lightnin' Hopkins - Happy New Year
2. Spike Jones and The City Slickers - Happy New Year!!
3. Camera Obscura - Happy New Year
   Sure doesn't sound like a celebratory New Year's song... but it's sweet as sugar, so how can I reasonably resist?
4. Dan Fogelberg - Same Old Lang Syne
   Oh, I knew it was an ultra-cloying choice, but I couldn't help myself. I remember being around four years old, listening to this song in a car during a rainstorm, and getting my first hints of the emotional complications of adult life.

You know what time it's getting to be...

Starting off, here are three Christmas Eve tunes.

1. Leadbelly - Christmas Is A-Coming
2. Stan Freberg - The Night Before Christmas
3. The Beatles - Third Christmas Record

And here we have 74 minutes of Christmas Day soundwaves. With a few exceptions, I've tried to avoid songs that have absorbed any hint of overplayed-Muzak stench.

On the one hand, this means that there's no appearance of Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmas Time" (which I still haven't come to hate), but on the other hand, you won't hear Yoko honking her way through "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)".

1. El Vez - Brown Christmas
2. Juan García Esquivel - Sun Valley Ski Run
   I came to associate this song with the Cool Cool Mountain level in Super Mario 64. (And I also associate this song with this GoldenEye 007 level... but I guess that's neither here nor there.)
3. The Sisterhood - Christmas Treat, Peppermint
   Pretty versatile items, those peppermint candies.
4. Kimi and Ritz - Merry Christmas Baby
   Featuring a pre-Rocky Horror Richard O'Brien.
5. Elvis Presley - Blue Christmas
   Couldn't help it.
6. Bathing Beauty - Christmas Tears
   This is just absolutely devastating. It comes to us via WFMU.
7. Freddie King - Christmas Tears
   Not the same teardrops.
8. Rosalie Sorrels - Party Crasher's Carol
   Enough with the maudlin lacrymosity, already!
9. Komeda - Top Star
   In the late 90's, there was a fantastic FTP site called Gameraweb, which turned me on to so many amazing musicians. You have no idea how good it was. Gameraweb vanished one day and I never found out what happened to it, but I never forgot it. This next song was one of the first Gameraweb downloads I snagged, and it's the first Komeda song I heard. Instant love. Thanks, Gameraweb, wherever you've gone.
10. The Ramones - Merry Christmas (I Don't Want To Fight Tonight)
11. Sifl and Olly - Laser Eyes
    Er, well, they mention Christmas lights... Apropos of nothing, I'm convinced I knew the real-life Chester.
12. RUN-DMC - Christmas In Hollis
13. National Lampoon - Kung Fu Christmas
    Features the talents of Christopher Guest, Brian Doyle Murray, and pre-SNL Bill Murray and Gilda Radner.
14. James Brown - Let's Make This Christmas Mean Something This Year
15. Solomon Burke - Presents For Christmas
16. Louis Armstrong - Christmas Night In Harlem
17. Gene Autry - When Santa Claus Gets Your Letter
18. James Brown - Santa Claus Go Straight To The GhettoYet another charming track from the hardest working defendant in show business
    
19. The Sonics - Santa Claus
20. Toni Stante - ¿Mamacita, Dónde Está Santa Claus?
21. El Vez - Pancho Claus
    Musically speaking, this is a pretty straight-ahead cover of Lalo Guerrero's 1956's tune, but it's got a wilder, post-punk spirit than the original.
22. Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper - Son of Santa

NSFW - Selections which present an appalling lack of holiday spirit

For those of you that have been caught in retail-drone work or gift-gathering torture, I put together an antithesis of X-Mas Muzak. Most of the selections would be considered objectionable by the family-values crowd, so be judicious in your choice of listening environment.

Total playtime: 1 hour, 35 minutes

It's a bit chill, all right.

Good food, good eats...

Yes, here they are — fifty(!) songs that, if perhaps not particularly suited to the type of Thanksgiving that you celebrate, then are at least tangentially related to getting one's grub on. Good God, let's eat!

There are leftovers, by the by.