Deck Us All with Boston Charlie

Christmas always has been the most musical holiday of the year to me. Our home was, and is, filled with music almost every hour of the season. My father would even move speakers outdoors to share our celebration with the entire neighborhood.
The genre was Christmas music with little or no exclusion. The playlist included Gene Autry, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra featuring the Morman Tabernacle Choir, Louie Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Jo Stafford surrounded by her children for “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” (still among my favorites, a beautiful voice now all but forgotten,) even Lionel Barrymore and Ronald Coleman from a radio production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.



One of the biggest selling Christmas songs ever was sung by an eleven year old girl from Oklahoma City.
 Other personal favorites include:
• Jethro Tull, with their progressive reworking of We Three Kings, particularly appropriate in light of the recent loss of jazz giant Dave Brubeck.
• The Roches, as showcased in their performance of several Christmas carols HERE.
The Kingston Trio, whose album The Last Month of the Year is my favorite album of Christmas music. It is not the usual collection of hoary old chestnuts roasting on an open fire, but rather a celebration of Christmas with songs outside the traditional canon, balancing the secular with wonderful celebrations of the sacred.
• And a special mention of Yale, Oklahoma born Chet Baker, whose unnecessarily tragic life is documented in the film "Let’s Get Lost." His collection of seasonal standards, Silent Nights, is far from his best work. The songs are short and the arrangements are tediously conventional. But every now and then you can hear, in an all too brief solo, the soulful, quiet genius that was Chet Baker.      
I’ve saved my absolute favorites for last.
• Stan Freberg, the comedian of the clever arrangements and impeccable production skills, produces a scathing indictment of the commercialization of Christmas in “Green Christmas.”
• John Henry Faulk was a folklorist, earning a master’s degree in that subject at the University of Texas, a radio and television personality, and life-long civil rights crusader. In the 1950’s he was a leader in the fight against the blacklisting of artists resulting from the rabid, paranoid, and eventually hatefully incoherent anti-Communist ravings of Joseph McCarthy. An accomplished storyteller, his reminiscence of a Christmas long past is an entertaining, moving, and finally joyful definition of the true spirit of the season. And although it makes no mention of the Star of Bethlehem, the Three Wise Men, the shepherds in their fields, the hosts of heavenly angels singing praises in glorious adoration, nor the birth of Jesus the Christ, it illuminates and celebrates the true meaning of the season better than any of the music above. Listen, laugh, and learn. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.