The absolute timeless classics. Get yourself down to Nighthawks Bar, they've got the tinsel out AND are serving xmas cocktails and classic songs on us. Timeless classics need time.
On & off over the past decade, around about this time of year, I attempt to read A Christmas Pudding, by Nancy Mitford. I might have tried this say, six times out of the past 10 Christmas’s.
A Christmas Pudding is a whimsical English comic farce, the sort knocked out prolifically by P. G. Wodehouse. A country house is involved, and a gathering therein of various upper-class twits, scandalous rogues and poltroons, ‘damsels in distress’ and rather daft people getting up to all sorts of innocent shenanigans. It’s an inconsequential guilty pleasure - and I never can get through the damned thing.
The reasons are complicated. I don’t attempt to pick it up until December, for the same reason I cannot listen to Christmas songs until the actual month of merry. But then again, I don’t want to be reading a book about Christmas after December has gone. I’m a slow reader and a busy person who needs to read a lot. There’s the end-of-year work rush, hungover December days where non-essential reading is off the agenda. Some years, I just can’t find my copy of the damned book. We’ll have moved house, or something like that, and it will be deep in a box somewhere.
Mostly, the problem is thus: I don’t get to read it the way I imagine I want to read it. I imagine I want to read it distraction-free, worry-free and hassle-free. Without a care in the world, other than the plot and characters of Christmas Pudding, is how I want to read it. Perhaps by an open fire (“logs on the fire, fill me with desire”, but sadly I do not have an open fire). Or mid-afternoon in a country pub (yeah right).
It’s not a big book. It’s sort of a long novella really. But I can only ever get around a third of the way through it (like a real Christmas pudding) before the madness has struck, and it’s just not happening. Oh well. The other thing I imagine, is that when I do get to read it, the soundtrack is just right. I know I can do that part.
Indeed, here it is - in the form of our splendid vintage series The Comedown. These are the absolute classics (some of them forgotten). These are the greats, who do Christmas songs with golden tonsils. The sultry, seductive, velvet-voiced crooners. Why on earth we pass these up for Slade, The Pogues and such year after year after year, is lost on me. I have heard Andy Williams’s Most Wonderful Time Of The Year just once on the radio (surely this is the quintessential version of that particular number), but who wouldn’t play Julie London’s sublime I’d Like You For Christmas? Play it to your loved one while you’re exchanging presents and spice up your Christmas (“New Years and Easter too!”).
Who wouldn’t want to hear Dinah Shore’s ebullient You Meet The Nicest People (At Christmas), or Alma Cogan’s exquisite Christmas Cards? Or June Christy’s dexterous The Merriest? What about Dean Martin slurring his way through Silver Bells? And who could resist the very idea of being invited by Eartha Kitt to ‘trim my tree’ on this particular version of Santa Baby? (What is it with all this tree trimming by the way, did I miss something?).
And as if they are not great enough this time of year, there are Christmas crooners, but only one Frank Sinatra. We should hear them, each and every one, every single year.
But then again, simply hearing these tunes doesn’t do them justice, really. So forget the background xmas muzak - leave that to the usual fare. Instead, reserve yourself an hour. If you’re a super-busy type, you could even do some mindful present wrapping. Otherwise, fix yourself a drink and be prepared to put your feet up. After all, it is Christmas, and you’ll be with the ones you love soon enough. So, just enjoy. As Judy Garland says:
“until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow...so have yourself a merry little Christmas, now”.
And, if you’d like a good book to go with that, can I make a recommendation…?
Do have a happy holiday, and please explain this tree trimming thing to me at some point. I have never been good with innuendo.