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.
2 Days before Christmas:
As Eloise said, “It’s Christmas Eve Eve!” With that I am reminded that growing up, due to cultural traditions, today was actually Christmas Eve in our house. See, we’d wake up on the 24th of December and the gifts would be under the tree. That meant one thing – we’d spend the rest of the entire day waiting for Midnight Mass to come. We’d attend, and then it was back home to our Christmas dinner followed by the moment all my brothers and sisters and I had waited for – the opening of gifts after a very long and exciting day of waiting.
Throughout the day, we’d test the patience of our parents. We’d huddle around the gifts, shake a few and ask how long it would be before we could open them; knowing full well that nothing was happening until my dad took the final bite of his Christmas dinner.
To make the length of the day more enjoyable, I had an older sibling that would go through the collection of Christmas albums and ask my mom if we could play them. I presume my mother said yes, and gave us free reign over the record player, because it gave us all a common distraction (she didn’t have to keep answering our questions and we stayed busy entertaining ourselves) to make the minutes go by faster.
We eventually narrowed down the albums to those we thought were the most Christmas-y. This song, by this artist was on one of the preferred albums. It doesn’t get played much over the air, but every time I do hear it (the album is still at my parent’s house and I don’t have a record player) when I’m out and about, it brings back warm memories. I could listen to nothing but Percy Faith and Paul Mauriat during these 12 days leading up to Christmas and reminisce. I’m in no rush for Christmas to be over.
Enjoy.
The Harold Lounge 