Christmas music time

KING-fm has re-activated their "Holiday" channel, which plays mostly classical/sacred Christmas music. I have it on right now, it will be a great help to me during this coming crazy week. (I already had one person call in sick - someone who is trustworthy, I think - and I will have to be accepting their big paper late). (At the moment, they are playing a nice, simple string quartet arrangement of "The First Noel.")

Also, Sirius has put on a couple Christmas channels. "40s on 4" (which I actually have in my preset list on my car) plays mostly 30s-40s-50s stuff (though they play the Roy Conniff Singers far more often than I would choose; I don't like that kind of oversweetened, highly-produced, string-section-laden stuff. I prefer the Bing Crosby/Dean Martin type of Christmas pop stuff, where if it's a traditional carol they mostly respect its integrity, and if it's a secular song they have some fun with it. (I love the various version of "Jingle Bells" that Bing did - he did one version with the Mills Brothers, and another one with the Andrews Sisters).

I think they also took one of the "modern pop" channels (Maybe the "Love" channel, which I never listen to?) and made it a modern-style Christmas music channel.

I'm not so much in love with a lot of the current pop Christmas stuff; a lot of it seems to be more bent on showing off the vocal acrobatics (or enhanced vocal acrobatics) of the singer, and a lot of it tends to be way "over-sweetened."

I have a few recordings of stuff that's almost entirely acoustic (The Thorns, a band I'm not otherwise familiar with, have a very nice, very simple version of "Silent Night" that is on one of the albums of Christmas music that I have.

It's funny; the music I have is almost evenly divided between the straight-up High Church music ("Music from Tewksbury Abbey") or fairly old stuff (one of my favorite Christmas albums of all time is Gloria Dei Cantores "What Cheer." Though, surprisingly to me, the title track is NOT ancient, but rather, modern (The text is from the 1600s, though). And the other half is 1940s/50s stuff, mostly.

I suspect the more "modern" (though not really contemporaneous with my childhood era) may come from the fact that that was a lot of what my parents had as Christmas records when I was a kid - Gene Autry singing "Here Comes Santa Claus," for example. And from the fact that I just like Bing Crosby and Dean Martin and Ella Fitzgerald. (I love how Ella Fitzgerald could take a very simple, even childish, song like "Frosty the Snowman" and instead of seeming to act like it was below her, she had fun with it.)

I also have an album called something like "A Sentimental Christmas," which contains a few wartime pieces (WWII, of course), some of which kind of have the theme of "things aren't that great right now (or: someone we love very much is overseas), but they will be better in the future." I kind of like that sentiment; the fact that it is possible to acknowledge that not every Christmas can be - has to be - The Best Christmas EVER! But that it's still possible to be happy, to enjoy.