Xmas 2013: a soundtrack

Here is the tracklisting for you if you downloaded my Xmas 2013 Dropbox folder. If you didn't get that hook-up and want it, let me know, either via direct email or a comment on this page.

As to details, well, I may or may not write some sleevenotes and do a proper CD cover. But I do know that tomorrow I will post the next section of the Elvis A-Z and that on Christmas Day there will be a gift for you all.

1 Silver Bells Bing Crosby (1950)

2 Christmas at the Airport Nick Lowe (2013)

3 Up On The Housetop Pomplamoose (2010)

4 Frosty The Snowman Fiona Apple (2008)

5 Christmas Day With Me Laura Vane & the Vipertones (2009)

6 Merry Merry Christmas Alton Ellis & The Lipsticks (1972)

7 White Christmas Elvis Presley (1957)

8 I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus John Prine (1994)

9 Christmas In Prison Emmy the Great featuring Lightspeed Champion (2006)

10 Grateful For Christmas Hayes Carll (2011)

11 Call Collect On Christmas Del McCoury (2005)

12 I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day Nick Lowe (2013)

13 I Wrote To Santa Claus Huey Smith Piano & Clowns (1962)

14 Christmas Blues Canned Heat (1968)

15 Rocket Ship Santa The BellRays feat. Lisa Kekaula, Tony Fate and Bob Vennum (2005)

16 A Five Pound Box Of Money Pearl Bailey (1959)

17 Baby It's Cold Outside Ella Fitzgerald And Louis Jordan (1949)

18 Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) The Raveonettes (2008)

19 Cold White Christmas Casiotone For The Painfully Alone (2006)

20 Christmas Dirge Nellie McKay (2007)

21 Christmas Rhapsody Pledge Drive (2003)

22 How Will You Spend Christmas? Rev AW Nix (1930)


Next up  Uncle Silas Payne, the man who invented rock and roll?

Xmas compilation track listing

As ever, there is an Xmas selection. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue (only in the musical sense, this year). There is also a little new year and a touch of hannukah.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog about my rules for putting an Xmas compilation together.  I had twenty rules in all. This year, I have broken ten of them at least. Which were? Well, there is no Elvis, no Phil Spector, no White Christmas, no world music, no sexual revelation, nothing ethnic, no English folk, no reconsideration of a seemingly nauseating classic, no country music, nothing that would offend sensible opinion by its obviousness or the singer's identity.

So which ones didn't I break? 

Rule three The first track must be a familiar one . . . Well, this year's, Christmas Island, is fairly familiar.

Rule four Many, if not all, the best Christmas songs are about sadness, loss, separation and inevitability of death . . . Well, maybe not death but River is about loss and separation.

Rule six Many, if not all, the best Christmas songs are about family — its realities as well as its fantasies . . . See Xmas.

Rule nine There should be unfamiliar versions of familiar songs . . . See
Silent Night and, perhaps, River. Also even, Van Morrison's Santa Claus.

Rule ten There should be at least one quite unfamiliar new(ish) tunes. See Xmas, I'm Dreaming, Van Morrison's Santa Claus, Home For The Holidays.

Rule fourteen There should be something by Bing Crosby or Johnny Mercer . . . See Marshmallow World.

Rule fifteen There should be one or more example of the wonderful world of US black Christmas pop . . . A bit of a stretch as it wasn't a hit etc but see Riverside Drive.

Rule sixteen There should be wit . . . There's a lot of that this year. See, again, Riverside Drive. Also I'm Dreaming.

Rule nineteen There should be something that sounds like it was recorded in a cornflake factory . . . Listen to Happy New Year.

Rule twenty There should be something by a girlie indie singer with an off-putting name and shtick which is nonetheless surprisingly enticing . . . See Christmas Song, Home For The Holidays and Xmas.

I guess I have to add a few new rules, though . . .

Rule twenty-one It should reach beyond Xmas. See Happy New Year, 'Twas The Night Before Hannukah, The Latke Song.

Rule twenty-two The genuine believers should have a shake. Christmas Prayer, When Jesus Was Born, Did You Spend Christmas Day In Jail?

Anyway, here is the tracklisting.
 

1 Christmas Island Bob Archer & The Dinning Sisters

2 Marshmallow World Bing Crosby

3 Skating Vince Guaraldi

4 It Must Be Christmas Gerry Mulligan & Judy Holiday

5 Xmas Shelby Lynne

6 River Tracey Thorn

7 I'm Dreaming Randy Newman

8 When Jesus Was Born Sons Of Heaven

9 A Christmas Prayer Solomon Burke

10 How I Hate To See Xmas Come Around (Christmas Blues) Jimmy Witherspoon

11 Christmas On Riverside Drive August Darnell

12 Getting Ready For Christmas Day Paul Simon

13 Christmas Song Jenny Owen Youngs

14 Home For The Holidays Emmy the Great & Tim Wheeler

15 Silent Night Slow Club

16 Van Morrison's Santa Claus Rich Chambers

17 Happy New Year Lighnin' Hopkins

18 The Latke Song (Live) Debbie Friedman

19 Twas the Night Before Chanukah Stanley Adams and Sid Wayne

20 Did You Spend Christmas Day In Jail? Rev. J.M. Gates

21 Holiday I.D Lou Reed 

I might do some sleevenotes etc. I might not. I'll let you know next week.

If you didn't get an email inviting you to download the tracks from Dropbox, drop me an email or put a comment on this page and I'll send you a link. 

Xmas comes earlier and earlier . . .

I know it doesn't feel or look like it out of the window but it is still six months to Christmas but . . .

Spotted in Mayfair in early July. I eventually figured out it was the Marks & Spencer's buyer (or something) preview but still . . . they didn't have to have a snowman on public display. They could have been a bit more discreet.

Did you see that snowman move between the two pictures? I think you did.

To cheer you up and away from the bad side of Xmas in July, here is the good side . . . mambo, animation, reindeer, Billy May, what's not to like?

On the twelfth day of christmas . . .

Family. I'll be untypically emotive. Years ago now, I remember reading someone who, when asked which was more important, health or wealth, said: neither, it's family, because when you're sick or broke at least there is support around you. 

I'd add friends but, basically, it's true, isn't it. Few of us prosper without family and friends. In a meaningful sense, that is – which does include financially. Unhappiness is not just a product of not making your way in the world, it's also a reason. Unfair, I know, but . . .

I've been blessed, I guess. I have family and I have friends. Quite a few people occupy both categories. So . . . Xmas and its twelve days?

Well, over the break I read a piece by Ian Jack in the The Guardian in which he pointed out that London over Xmas has now become the kind of family place it used to be. Leaving aside the fact that in my area the exodus to second houses is so notable that you could have a half hour kip in the middle of the road, that is certainly true. Further, he added that the break has become a kind of retreat where families get to spend time with each other, across the generation. Some use the opportunity to fight and relive old wounds, I guess. But not everyone.

In which light, I can report that, over the break, my time-spent included . . .

* family outing to Billy Elliot matinee (young cousin is in the cast)

* Xmas dinner (cooked with my daughter) for a baker's dozen — on Boxing Day, it's a family tradition, leaving Xmas Day itself free for, well, nothing

* dinner with a couple of friends in Cornwall, one of whom I probably won't see for a while as she's heading off east to interior design junks (honestly)

* not one but two football matches with my younger son

* takeaway curry round our table for a dozen family or so

* a formal sit-down meal at a cousin's which I missed because of a bad cold - but got to eat takeaway the next morning

* a nuclear family meal on Xmas Eve

* giving phone cooking advice to a friend when the leg of lamb (an odd Xmas dinner choice, I know, but tradition isn't what it was, clearly) got left in the freezer by mistake and dinner was due in four hours - they say it was the best lamb they ever ate so maybe I stumbled on a new recipe

* brunch with cousins at their house in the far reaches of the known world (Bury St Edmunds)

* a friend's birthday party in his brother's pub

* a New Year's Day party at a friend's

* a completely private New Year's Eve – another family tradition

* picking up my elder son and dropping him at the airport - and, because of Luton's parsimony, having to pay a pound each time for the privilege

* more, probably, that I've forgotten about

And so that's your lot, folks. 

Tomorrow (or perhaps the day after), I'll post the sleevenotes for my Xmas music selection.

On the eleventh day of Christmas . . .

A walk along the Thames at Mednenham. There's a long, flat stretch between an old, now disused ferry point and the locks below Henley. It curves slowly. 

I've walked it in sun and gloom and cold – though not in the rain, it's true. I've shared the early morning with caravanners and watched a stunt flier practise in a sharp blue sky, rolling and tumbling. I've done the whole walk without seeing anyone else. And I've walked back through the fields when you can't see past the crops and when the earth has been cleared for the winter.

It's a completely humanized landscape. There is no trace of what might have been there before our ancient ancestors moved in. But still, in the way the whole of the Thames Valley does, it has a deep, sharp sense of, well, nature. Not the real thing, of course, but certainly the 'real' thing – and that, being a human, is what I'm after. Reality is for animals. 'Reality' is what us princes want and cherish.

PS It's also possible that my thoughts and feelings are coloured and shaped by the fact that my father spent the war based at Danesfield House – which still forms an impenetrable riverside barrier at one end of the walk. It was the base for aerial reconnaissance intelligence. He looked at photographs, in pairs, and turned them into maps. I should think my parents walked this walk, a decade and more before I was born. When the fliers would have been practising for a different kind of show.

Till tomorrow . . .

On the tenth day of Christmas . . .

Valerio Spada's Gomorrah Girl. A photobook. A chronicle of a death in a southern Italian ghetto. Two visual narratives physically interleaved in one book. In a time where the book as object is clearly changing dramatically, Gomorrah Girl is something that could not exist in any other form. A Kindle, it could not be.

It was put together by Dutch designer Sybren Kuiper. And that is a not insignificant factor in its triumph.

It won a prize. But, not to show off or anything, I'd bought it some time before that. I was writing a piece about photobooks. This piece (which you can download if you want, as a pdf) . . .

PP Jul11 Bookshelf

Writing the piece, I became increasingly enamoured of a new wave of almost handmade and almost self-published photobooks. All are, of necessity, limited editions. This was one of the ones I bought. It was in an edition of 500 and came out early last year.

And that's another reason to think about it. I paid 30 Euros for my copy. That edition sold out. Then, recently, a second edition was published, at 39.50 Euro. That, too, has sold out. A copy of that second edition is available on Amazon.com for 150 dollars. 

If I can't have Gomorrah Girl, then I'll have Happy Birthday To You, made in psychiatric units by Anouk Kruithof. That cost me 20 Euros, I think. That did well, too. There don't seem to be any copies around. Last time I looked one would cost you more than 150 dollars.

Now, I'm not suggesting you (or I) buy these books for investment. They are objects that are worth their own existence and a place in your/my place. Nor will all such books rise in value. And you are also providing an income source for artisans/artists whose photography work was ceasing to do so. Be a patron. Buy now. Buy several. Enjoy them. Maybe make a few shekels.

And if it can't be a self-published book, then I'd have Simon Norfolk's most recent work on Afghanistan, in which he paired (well, kind of) his own photographs with a 19th century record of the benighted land, made by John Burke. There was a (great) show at the Tate. The lavish pale light of the images set up challenging duologues with the original black and whites — orthochromatic, so the colour representation was quite different from our modern panchromatic world. Afghanis, for one, appear far darker than they are - technical considerations inducing ideological outcomes.

The book is even better. The portraits make sense, to me, in a way they didn't in the gallery. There are more pictures, too

Till tomorrow

On the ninth day of Christmas . . .

A kebab roll at Lahore.

Just off the Commercial Road. Once upon a time it was the tiniest of takeaway joints. These days it's all dressed up and getting bigger every time I go there. It's now even got frontage on to the Commercial Rd.

Things don't change, though. The takeaway kebab rolls (lamb, minced and herbed, with salad, wrapped in circle of bread) are an eternal. For £3.50. 

Sometimes I eat there, too. There are marbly surfaces. An open kitchen. All male staff, cooks and waiters. Big TVs on every wall, mostly with football playing. My friend Paul who has subcontintental history and knows about these things tells me it's just like the real Lahore, a little bit of Pakistani life in east London.

The social mix is a delight, too, particularly on Friday nights. City dealers, getting drunk on byo booze. Essex families (Gavin & Stacey alikes) driving up against the rush hour flow. Mix and match Asian/English families where one woman will be in an A4 skirt, with her breasts hanging out and another will be wrapped in black. Strict Muslim families where — I've seen this with my own eyes — the beard of a pater familias shouts at the waiters to take the cutlery away before they will sit down.

Or maybe I'd go for a falafel at Marco Polo, a Lebanese cafe on Marylebone High St - my regular breakfast after early morning visits to the dental hygienist. (You don't want to turn up with bits of toast in your interstitials, now, do you.)

Till tomorrow . . .

On the eighth day of Christmas . . .

The Social Network. Among from the all the many reasons to applaud it, three things . . .

One Its yellowy colour overall. Despite two viewings of the movie, I'm not sure quite what the meaning is. Despite having written a piece for Hungry Eye magazine on this subject, I'm still uncertain about it. Perhaps uncertainty is yellow. Perhaps yellowness evokes uncertainty. I'll let you know when I've got the answer. Maybe it'll arrive in the next post.

Two It didn't feel like 'film'. Most movies, even good ones, have tricks and rhythms that feel so familiar, that are so familiar that you exist in a state of predictive nostalgia. (Which is something I'm working away at in another context, pop songs.) They have soundtracks that insist on doing your feeling (and thinking, too) for you. The Social Network doesn't do that. It has the rhythms etc not of life, of course, but of 'life', at least.

Three Written by a TV guy. There are loads of great things on British TV now. Funny stuff. Documentary stuff. Sports stuff. Historical drama stuff. But the contemporary drama stuff is complete bollocks. Even the stuff that is good is terrible. Maybe the producers and writers and directors should consider having a look at The Social Network.

Till later today . . .

On the seventh day of Christmas . . .

(To catch up, I'm doing two a day.)

A pint of Dark Star Hophead. I know it's traditional and cringe-inducing for ale to have names that sound like Bill Bailey's hair looks. So I do have a problem with a brewery whose name evokes (or invokes even) the Grateful Dead and an ale with a weedy (ho, ho) pun of a name.

But it's fabulous stuff from the most successful new brewery in England. (Thank you, Gordon Brown, for your untypically canny tax break incentive for small brewers.) I'm not the only that rates it, either. See here.

Though from Sussex, it's become a London staple. It's what I order in pubs - if it's there. Which is how I came to realise how high I rate it. You can't get it or anything like it in the bit of Cornwall I spend some of the year in. Heligan Honey or Doom Bar just aren't the same. Though Tribute, if it's cold, is its own joy.

Where would I drink it? At my friends Kirk and Paul's place, Tapping the Admiral. Or perhaps at the Southampton Arms, with its 'Ale Cider Meat' sign. Or maybe the Euston Tap — there really aren't many neo-neo-neo-Classical pubs. (Or tube stations — including, as I discovered yesterday, Brent Cross.)

If this makes me sound like some beer bore, just for you I'll get a bit pretentious about it and say it is a fine citrus flavour (American hops, I think, if I was told right). In fact, I'll go further and say it has the air of pomelo . . .

See you soon.

On the sixth day of Christmas . . .

(Running a bit late, I know. Blame a cold.)

A Man With Two Guvnors. I saw it at the National a few months ago. There is little to add to the rave reviews. A couple of things, maybe . . .

One Setting it in Brighton in the 1960s and linking it to Carry On films etc gives a real tangible sense of the immutability of human concupiscence. From old Italian stuff to post-Graham Greene Regency seaside hows-your-father to, well, the National Theatre.

Two Like all great comedy, it is tragedy turned inside out. Thus flipped, it could be considered as, well, perhaps a Brechtian drama about the inherent dialetical contradictions of mercantile capitalism — Threepenny Opera, with fewer gags (ha ha). Or, as an emodiment of Kleinian theory — a case study of continuous (and finally productive) oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions.

Joking aside . . . actually, I'm not really joking. I've always thought jokes are more serious than serious stuff. That's why so many great stand-ups are such coke-head psychos (if their attitude and material is a good guide). To paraphrase Woody Allen on sex. Q: Is comedy also nasty and violent? A: Only if it's done right.

For my psychoanalytic studies, I wrote an essay which took The Importance of Being Earnest and unfolded its narrative back into its real rather than dramatic order. This produced an Oedipal tale, with a backstory of spousal abuse. It was respectably received, too. No one told me I was taking the piss, anyway. Which I perhaps was, a bit. But also most definitely wasn't.

Plus a little something for football fans. Well, fans of football commentators.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/front_page/16368728.stm

On the fifth day of Christmas . . .

Salut les Copains box sets. Two volumes.

When I was young, really young, fifteen etc, my friend Mick Lee's sister who was eighteen and at Queen's Belfast was really into things French. And therefore so were we. We wore Newman cord jeans. And we read Salut les Copains magazine.

Years later, I discovered that Salut was the basis for The Face. At the time, though, we just thought it was a cool teen magazine.

It was only recently, though, that I learned that Salut les Copains was also a radio show. Someone pointed me in the direction of two four CD collections. I bought them. It's a fascinating world. French teenage 1960s pop, half-looking at the UK and the US, half-looking at its French self. So it's the echt Booker T and the MGs followed by a local version of The Lion Sleeps Tonight etc etc. Lots of Petula Clark. Lots of ye-ye. One of the sounds of my teenagehood. I file them next to my Rhino girl group collection which came in a hatbox - the campest thing ever manufactured.

PS When I looked up the hotlink for the box sets, I discovered that there is now a third set. So you know what to get me – and yourself – for next Christmas.

See you tomorrow . . .

On the fourth day of Christmas . . .

A train ride from Exeter to Totnes. It's the most wonderful journey, running down the Exe estuary then along the coast — right next to it, then up the Teign estuary. Less than thirty miles in all, I think. I'm entranced by it every time I take the train to (or from) Cornwall.

You start out in this wonderful calm, flat seaside place, then turn right on to a section where the train runs in and out of short tunnels, bang next to the sea, separating the towns/villages from the briny. In wet, wild weather, the waves break over the train. Finally, you head inland up through the most mild-mannered of riverscapes – a few bobbing boats, a wooded hillside on the far bank.

Everyone goes quiet for most of the journey.

Here is a small film of it. Warning: it's very amateur, far from the best film, with too many shots of the inside of the carriage and not including anything from the Exe estuary. It does, though, describe itself as a record of the second best rail journey in Britain. Which is the best, though, it doesn't say. Maybe St Erth to St Ives.

PS I also did a gorgeous train journey in Israel this year, taking the old, French-built line from Jerusalem down to the coast. The station is in some odd part of Jerusalem, the original station on the east (Palestinian) side of the old city having been closed for years. The first half hour of the journey is a slow meander down a narrow valley, crossing and recrossing the river. I guess it must have been the old historical route into the city. It's certainly not the quickest. On some of the corners, I reckon you could get out, pick some flowers and cut across in time to get back on the train again.

Till tomorrow . . .

On the third day of Christmas . . .

Bruce Davidson's Subway, a reissue of a 1986 original (by Steidl, reliably gorgeous photo and art books). A memory of a New York so different it's hard to realise it's only a couple of decades ago. Look at the graffitied subway cars and think: how come? well, how come and why did no-one remove it? it wasn't because they thought them beautiful . . . it was a kind of social stuckness, an inability to wrest control of the environment.

The more you look at the pictures, the more you realise how smart they are. Davidson is describing a world that he knows is terrifying. He got mugged doing it.

Like everyone else I know who knew the city in that time, it's hard not to feel, well, not nostalgia but a sense of change so sharp as to have its own pain. It was frightening, dirty, threatening, dysfunctional - particularly on the subway at 3.30 in the morning. Yet . . .

PS1 Below, you will find my interview with Davidson from earlier this year. You can download it as well as read it onscreen.

PS2 I also think it's highly likely that it will sell out, sooner rather than later, and therefore hold its value, maybe even increase. But more of investing in photobooks for fun and profit on another of the twelve days . . .

See you tomorrow . . . 


PP_May11_BruceDavidson

On the second day of Christmas . . . the partridge but not the tree

I know the bird thing is meant to be the first day of Christmas but somehow I got it in my head that the twelve days start on December 26. I was wrong, of course. 

(The truth - the embarrassing truth - is that I took that Boxing Day start from iTunes. That's when you start getting free stuff from iTunes that you might or might not want. Today is some Coldplay stuff. I've downloaded it and will listen to it, just as I listen to Coldplay stuff again and again - without ever being able to remember I've listened to it.)

So, let's say yesterday was the first of my twelve days and so I gave you a list of what I think you might want to listen to this season. And today . . .

That partridge. Pheasant, too. And woodcock even. Everyone should eat them. The perfect meal for these straightened times. Honestly. That's not just from a comfortable north London perspective.

I always liked to eat game but it's only recently that I realised just how cheap it is.  I was buying a couple of pheasants in the local farmers market (please, no correspondence about the absence of an apostrophe in farmers - that solution is as good as any). I saw I was only paying six quid or so for a brace - as we gamers choose to refer to a couple/pair/two. That is certainly cheaper than a decent chicken. I'm not talking organic, that's so much hogwash. But I am talking about a bird that hasn't been subjected to extreme rendition and then kept, for its thankfully all too short life, in avian Guantanamo.

Partridge are little pricier and woodcock even more. But still  . . . these are bargains. (Though not if you buy them in, say, St John's Wood High St where they stick the arm in and price them up to six quid each. My guess is they make in the region of four pounds fifty profit a bird. Nice region, to paraphrase De Niro in Midnight Run - or rather George Gallo who wrote the movie.)

So . . . high-protein, low-fat, free-range and cheap. To the purchaser, anyway. A friend of mine who 'shoots' tells me the 'real' cost of these birds is maybe thirty quid. That is what it costs 'guns' in 'syndicates' - love the gangster language, don't you.

Again then . . . not just good for you and the bird and cheap but also subsidised by the rich and gun-happy among us. Not just a trifecta but a quadrafecta. A quintafecta, if you reckon game tastes as great as I do. Even if you don't like game, you could always consider eating it as an act of class revenge. Take that, you wanker banker, you could say, as you slice off some nice rare pheasant breast or scoop some lentils out with your junipery partridge.

So, as Swift was kind of on the right track when he proposed eating children as a solution to the Irish famine, if he were around now I think he'd join me in suggesting a resolution to the current unemployment and obesity thing. Another paraphrase: qu'ils mangent du perdrix. 

Oh and sprats, too. You can feed a family of five on a kilo of those.

But, I hear you say, I don't know how to cook game. Here's the secret. There is no secret. You put the birds in a hot oven for half an hour. You take them out. Sure, you can do other stuff. Add salt and pepper and some herbage. Protect the breast with bacon or foil. Leave them to sit for five minutes. But that'll do. Heat, eat.

With? Lentils or barley. Same thing. Boil and drain will do. Add salt, pepper, fried onion, diced carrots/celery, thyme or other herbs, stock - even better. 

Sprats? Dust in flour. Fry in oil. Take out. Eat. Add lemon juice, paprika or dip in mayonnaise.

Food and recipes, that's  just what you need today of all days, right?

See you tomorrow.

Songs for the day

Here are this year's seasonal songs — Hannukah as well as Xmas. If you are on my emailing list you will have received a link to download all the tracks from my Dropbox folder. If not, post a comment with your email address and I'll send you a link.

There will also be sleeve notes posted here sometime between now and the new year.

1 Silver Bells Doris Day
2 Frosty The Snowman Jan Garber Orchestra
3 Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer Mambo Billy May
4 On The Rooftop Gentleman Auction House
5 Must Be Santa Brave Combo
6 Merry Christmas Polka The Andrews Sisters
7 Boogie-Woogie Santa Claus Mabel Scott with Les Welch
8 Hey Santa Claus The Platters
9 Back Door Santa Clarence Carter
10 Please Come Home For Christmas Charles Brown
11 I Saw Three Ships Don Dixon
12 Silent Night The Miracles
13 Cold Dark Night Sam Phillips
14 Joy to the World Kate Rusby
15 Happy New Year Beverley
16 New Year's Eve Tom Waits
17 Last Christmas minuteman
18 The Chanukah Song Neil Diamond
19 Jesus was a Dreidel Spinner Jill Sobule
20 All I Want To Do Is Shag For Christmas The BellRays feat. Lisa Kekaula, Tony Fate and Bob Vennum
21 Jingle Bells Bing Crosby

PS If you want more Xmas etc songs, go here. My friend — well, friendly acquaintance — Bill Adler has done an Xmas CD (and before that, a tape) for years now. As a New York Jew, it was his way of making sense of his wife's mid-Western family Xmas celebration. This year, I'm particularly taken by Byron Lee and the Dragonaires' Winter Wonderland Reggay and Reuben Anderson's Christmas Time Again, both mid-1960s Jamaican. The second is on a wonderful green and yellow label — a proto Island Records one, I think.

Next up Starting tomorrow, Boxing Day, I will, as promised, be posting my twelve days of Christmas. Stuff I like. Presents I would have bought myself. Etc etc. First up, yes, that partridge in the song . . .