the list of now

Bob Dylan sings Christmas in MY heart!

Call me crazy, but I think Bob Dylan’s Christmas album is totally wonderful.

I feel like everyone is missing the point and that it’s supposed to be campy and a bit ridiculous.  I mean, look at the picture he chose for the album cover!  I feel like he knows how he sounds on these songs and doesn’t care or did the arrangements intentionally to clash a bit or poke fun.  I also feel like none of that really matters because when I listen to it, I giggle and feel happy and Christmas-y and that’s the point isn’t it?

Listen to this great 5 minute critique from Ken Tucker on NPR’s Fresh Air.  You can hear some of the tracks and Tucker pretty much agrees with me, but says it with perfect balance of mocking/love:

Among those criticisms is the odd complaint that Dylan’s voice sounds awful. I’m sorry, have you not been listening to Dylan for the past decade — or for his entire career? An imperfect vocal instrument is at once characteristic of Dylan and a limitation he’s frequently turned to his advantage. And as far as the idea that covering songs such as “Christmas Island” and “Here Comes Santa Claus” is cornball, well, the flip-side of cornball is amusement in context. Dylan, producing himself under the name “Jack Frost,” is surrounding himself with sweet choral voices and arrangements straight out of a 1960s middle-of-the-road or “countrypolitan” album. It’s just that instead of hearing Johnny Mathis or Eddy Arnold crooning, you have Dylan croaking with both solemnity and a wink.
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Come on — that’s fun, in the manner of other Christmas songs ranging from Eartha Kitt’s “Santa Baby” to the Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping.”

…

And Dylan does make his slow, deliberate version of “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” sound more like a threat than a promise.

(that’s accurate and hilarious)

And yet I love it.   Darcy loves it too, although I suspect more ironically.

She had this to say about the album:

Someone needs to take the microphone away from Grandpa Dylan.

I can’t wait for the day after Thanksgiving when I am “allowed” to break out all the Christmas music and movies.  I will be sharing this album with (or inflicting this album on)  all my loved ones!

I ((heart)) the holiday season

1.  Decorating!

We got our Christmas tree and put up most of our decorations.  Now that we have a house to decorate instead of a tiny one-bedroom apartment, our sparse amount of decorations look even sparser.   We are working on adding to the collection, but here are some pictures of what’s up so far!

To ogle more holiday decor-porn, go to Joe’s blog and see his pretty vintage tree ornaments and homemade crafty paper decorations.

2.  So that you don’t wake up on December 25th and miss it.

My brother Jonathan brought the delightfully blunt website Is it Christmas? to my attention a couple of months ago.   Darcy noticed a couple of days ago, that the answer to the question is a feed link.   So you can subscribe to it and it will let you know daily that it is not yet Christmas. (Until it is Christmas and then we aren’t entirely sure what will happen.  Can’t wait to find out.)

3.  Good Advice: Don’t spread those hate-germs!

I happen to loathe when large amounts of celebrities get together to do a “message” song recording.  (Heal the World, Voices that Care, Do They Know It’s Christmastime?  That’s What Friends Are For etc).   I think it is great when the profits go to a worthy cause and all, but the resulting songs are truly truly awful.

So I was pleased to see a well-done mockery of this concept holiday song, with a general message that I can get behind (and lots of awesome people making appearances!  Serenity fans wait until nearly the very end to see Nathan Fillion dancing.  It makes me very happy.)

Please Don’t Bomb Nobody This Holiday