It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year! Not.

The Legatus hates Christmas, of course.  I opted out of Secret Santa at work, the buffet lunch and drinks and only briefly attended the evening Christmas party.   I lasted ten minutes at the latter as I couldn't hear a single word anyone was saying due to the awful thump, thump music and acoustics of the brick lined nineteenth century warehouse cellar the event took place in.

Of all the aspects of Christmas I hate, Christmas music comes top of the list.  Even including Carols the problem is that the oeuvre of Christmas music is so narrow that we are talking about a few dozen 'classic' songs endlessly dressed up and re-recorded.  It says something about Christmas music when the last 'classic' was Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You, twenty one years ago.

Even the traditional songs and carols form quite a small group.  Of the latter Ding dong Merrily on High is my most hated, in that it sums up everything I despise about choirs.  This particular one encouraging choirs into more sub-Dickensian gurning and theatrical forced jollity than any other.  There is always a fat, bald, singer with wire frame glasses who thinks he is Mr Pickwick in every Christmas carol choir.  "We who wiggy-wig below", ho, ho ho, as they seem to be singing to my assaulted ears.

Seasonal favourite Winter Wonderland, for example, has been recorded more than two hundred times.  This song doesn't actually even mention Christmas, with the lyrics being written by an ailing Dick Smith while looking at the snowbound Honesdale Central Park in Pennsylvania.  Written in a sanatorium while suffering from tuberculosis, Smith died less than a year later, a day short of his 34th birthday.  Such should be the fate of all who promote Christmas 'cheer'.

Christmas means that Classic FM becomes unlistenable to, as every other tune is a seasonal one.  So I have to switch it off every five minutes or so rather than just waiting to turn it off when the endless adverts for dental implant specialists (tells you a lot about the average listeners) Dawood & Tanner come on (although, interestingly, they are pioneers in 3D printing of false teeth).

Fortunately, we do not get quite as inundated with Christmas music as in North America, although Tesco is pretty unbearable at the moment.  Waitrose, thank goodness, do not play music and do not let their staff wear Christmas hats.  Guess who gets my Christmas shop?

Some years ago I did a three week tour of  Canada and the US and found Christmas music playing everywhere: airports, hotels, shopping malls and even government buildings.  I had breakfast, lunch and dinner every day to an accompaniment of the same two dozen Christmas 'favourites'.  Even worse the North American appreciation for what makes good Christmas music seemed to be forever stuck in the thirties (Santa Claus is Coming to Town was also written in 1934), forties (White Christmas and The Christmas Song) and fifties (Little Drummer Boy - I hate that one).  There was no leavening by more comparatively recent numbers by the likes of Slade, Wizzard, Jona Lewie, The Pogues or even George Michael.  It was all Bing Crosby, Perry Como and, worst of all, Andy Williams.  I was hearing Andy Williams' It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year at least half a dozen times a day.  It was everywhere, like a sort of aural Black Death. There was no escape.

Claudine Longet. What was it that attracted her to the 5' 6" tall, nearly twice her age multi-millionaire singer?

When I was younger the Andy Williams show was a staple of my family's Saturday evening TV viewing. Apart from the oleaginous Andy it also introduced the world to the Osmonds, for which it can never be forgiven. Also slinking around on the show was Williams' French wife, Claudine Longet.  Longet was a "dancer" at the Las Vegas Folies Bergere who Williams literally picked up at the side of the road when she was 18.  They separated in the mid seventies and she set herself up with a skier, Vladimir Sabich, who was later shot dead by Longet in what she claimed was a tragic accident, while he was showing her how his pistol (!) worked. This despite the fact that the autopsy showed that he was shot in the back from over six feet away. Amazingly, Longet was only found guilty of criminal negligence and served only 30 days in prison on the grounds that she had to look after her three young children.. Williams supported her throughout financially and emotionally but after her short sentence she dumped the children and hopped off to the Caribbean with her defense attorney who she later married. 

The Andy Williams Christmas Album was released in 1963 and it's standout hit, It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year was, comparatively, a slow burner.  Santa Claus is Coming to Town, for example, sold over 30,000 copies within 24 hours of its release in November 1934.  It wasn't even the single released to promote Williams' album; that was White Christmas.  But over the ensuing years its popularity, boosted by Williams TV show, grew like toadstools in a rotting tree stump.

Now, I have to confess to actually owning a copy of The Andy Williams Christmas Album because, having moaned about its North American ubiquity after my business trip, my 'friend' bought it for me for Christmas 'as a joke" thereby injecting it, like a virulent bio-agent, into my household.  "Oh goodie!  Christmas tunes," said my daughter who wears a Christmas hat for the entire ten day period that now makes up Christmas in Britain.  So I had no choice but to endure it again and again that year as she happily span it on my CD player. Actually, having this abomination played all the way through made me realise that It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year is a positive highlight compared with much of the teeth-rottingly syrupy, candy-coated, sugar-frosted dross of the rest of the album. Silver Bells possibly taking the Smartie covered biscuit as the most musically inept and annoying song on there. It's as if someone had said, "Let's write a Christmas standard!" and then totally failed.

The Legatus plays only one Christmas album and then only late at night on Christmas Eve when I will indulge in a glass or two of Port and the spare, elegant tones of A Dave Brubeck Christmas to celebrate the fact that the whole ghastly season will shortly be over.

I will return after Christmas with my annual wargaming and non-wargaming highlights of the year. Until then, I wish all my readers a better time than I will be having!  Bah!  Humbug!