The 12 Days of [Christmas songs before] Christmas is a semester break special borrowing from the traditional 12 Days of Christmas (that occur after December 25th). The point is to get you into the spirit of the season by recommending one song per day leading up to Christmas. Members of Camp Realist couldn’t decide whether to go iconic, popular, memorable, or classic. So we narrowed the list down to a bit of each.
Comments are always welcomed. If you have a better version of the song, let me know. Do enjoy and sing along if you’d like! Or if any special memory is associated with the song, feel free to leave a reply.
11 Days before Christmas:
Remember when this song came out? We were 3 years into MTV, so you probably remember watching the video too. It went on to spawn other iterations of musicians coming together to raise money for one cause or another. If not for Band Aid, who knows if the 12-12-12 Concert for Sandy Relief is even thought of as a way to monetarily aid others.
Yes, you may tire of hearing this song EVERY SINGLE CHRISTMAS SEASON! Yes, it gets about as much airplay now as it did when it first came out in 1984. (For a while, between then and now, I didn’t hear it and then all of a sudden it was as popular as the other songs that will be on this series of posts.)
In any case, you may tire of the melody, but the lyrics, not necessarily the greatest but certainly thought-provoking for a Christmas tune, bear repeating on a daily basis. They are a humble reminder of how blessed I am to be here, in this land of plenty, and how it was due to nothing but geographic location and the free will of past family members that allow me to be on the giving end rather than the receiving end of this humanitarian reality.
I ignorantly demoted the lyrics in my pre-philosophical days, to being irrelevant over the flashy melody. Now, post-philosophy 101, the words bellowing out of those music stars of the 80s make me pause every now and then to reflect on the God-given gift of life.
The Harold Lounge 