The Mother-in-Law Xmas Mix Tapes

By Stephen Fried

[Note: I wrote this in 1990 for my GQ music column after I had been making holiday mix tapes for my mother-in-law, Joan Ayres, for four years. The tradition continued through 2017, so I made 31 holiday mixes in total — on cassette tapes and later CDs — and some of her grandchildren made mixes, too. Joan died on 12/14/18 at the age of 87. The photo below of Joan, my wife, Diane and me is from my second holiday with the family in 1987. This piece was originally published in GQ as “ When the Little Drummer Boy Is a Ramone, You Better Watch Out.”]

It all began as an attempt to kiss up to my new in-laws. I was being taken home for the holidays for the first time and looking to make an instant impact on a family that fervently did Christmas (and already had one Jewish son-in-law named Steve). After a briefing by my wife on family holiday traditions, I planned a two-pronged offensive for acceptance.

First, I would act much nicer than I actually am. And second, I would co-opt a tactic my new brother-in-law had been using for years: sucking up to the family by giving them tapes of various records from his collection. I decided to make a Christmas-theme tape to announce there was a new Steve to be reckoned with.

I didn’t spend a long time on the tape; I recorded new-age pianist George Winston’s December, then slapped on some soothing seasonal tracks, thinking that the idea was more important than the execution anyway. And, briefly, it was the thought that counted and the tape was a huge success. Then my brother-in-law showed up — with his own Christmas tape. He had recorded a Washington, D.C., radio show for which some disc jockey had dug up an astonishing array of jazz, soul and gospel versions of Christmas tunes. Then he edited out the commercials and the voice-overs and cleverly labeled the tape “Not-So-White Christmas.” With one quick push of the “play” button, he fixed my position in the family as “the other Steve” for at least a year to come.

My resolve to outdo him was the beginning of my obsession with Christmas Music for Nonbelievers. I vowed that the next year I would program a ninety-minute tape of cool Yule tunes that was as good as or better than “Not-So-White Christmas.” And I have continued to make these tapes every year since.

My quest for tunes to fill these tapes has become an endless search for the white Christmas wail. It’s something like a true fan’s pursuit of obscure B-sides by a favorite artist expanded to include all artists (though I draw the line at ultra-traditional recordings and syrupy, string-laden Ray Conniff-style stuff). And I’ve found that, within the context of what a reasonably open-minded music fan would listen to, there is an amazing variety of pop, jazz, bluegrass, soul, rap and even punk holiday recordings.

Beyond the sheer wonderfulness of their existence — I feel better about the world just knowing that the Ramones did a Christmas song — many of these recordings have a playfulness, a certain dashed-off quality that is often lacking in mainstream pop releases. A throwaway Christmas tune allows established artists to record the way they did when they were still young and stupid. And the slaphappy sound of not knowing any better comes through on lots of holiday tracks. I remember, during the late Seventies, when progressive radio stations greeted the season with Bruce Springsteen’s exhilarating pickup version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” It was fresh, funny, alive and even a bit rebellious, just as Phil Spector’s Christmas album with the Ronettes and Darlene Love — A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector (Rhino) — probably seemed in 1964.

The MTV generation rediscovered Christmas music with A&M’s 1987 release AVery Special Christmas, which featured Sting, the Pretenders, Springsteen and John Cougar Mellencamp singing to raise funds for the Special Olympics. But Christmas tunes had been quietly coming back for several years before that. In 1984, Bob Geldof recorded “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and EMI released in Europe A Rockin’ Xmas, which collected such disparate cuts as Percy Sledge’s “Silent Night,” John and Yoko’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” and the Beach Boys’ “Little Saint Nick.” The next year, Rhino Records began its ambitious and hilarious holiday series with Rockin’ Christmas compilations of Fifties and Sixties tunes: everything from Bobby Helms’s “Jingle Bell Rock” to Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “Monsters’ Holiday.” Suddenly, the record business remembered that hundreds of Christmas novelty recordings were sitting in vaults, largely unexploited.

In 1986, two important Christmas records were released. One was a Warner Bros, radio-promotion record called Yulesville that put together various holiday greetings (“Hi, this is Madonna. Don’t drive drunk”) with Christmas songs recorded by both famous and fame-seeking Warner acts. It featured Prince’s hard-to-find B-side “Another Lonely Christmas,” the Pretenders’ “2000 Miles” and Ed “Kookie” Byrnes’s tour de hep “Yulesville.” But it also had cuts done just for the promo: Randy Travis singing “White Christmas Makes Me Blue,” Aztec Camera delivering a Django Reinhardt-esque holiday guitar medley called “Hot Club of Christ” and the Ramones performing their seminal “Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight Tonight).”

That same year, Rhino released Cool Yule, the quintessential holiday-oldies collection, unearthing such classic Christmas rock as Clarence Carter’s “Back Door Santa,” James Brown’s “Santa Claus Goes Straight to the Ghetto” and Booker T. & the MGs’ instrumental “Jingle Bells.”

An increased interest in Christmas music, combined with the repackage-mania caused by CDs, resulted in a deluge of reissues and slapped-together compilations, many with the same ubiquitous over-licensed recordings. All these discs include tracks from the three basic Christmas-song groups. There are stylized covers of the traditional holiday songs written between Christ’s birth and Bing Crosby’s 1955 release of “White Christmas.” There are the surprisingly few contemporary and novelty Christmas pop songs recorded from the Forties through the Sixties that get re-covered every few years, including Louis Armstrong’s “ ‘Zat You, Santa Claus,” Eartha Kitt’s “Santa Baby” and Chuck Berry’s “Run, Rudolph, Run.”

And then some artists even write new Christmas songs, such as Run-D.M.C. and “Christmas in Hollis” (from A Very Special Christmas), a rap over a sample of “Back Door Santa,” Robbie Robertson and “Christmas Must Be Tonight” (on theScrooged sound track), the O’Jays and “Christmas Ain’t Christmas, New Year’s Ain’t New Year’s, Without the One You Love” (a pre-Philly Sound Gamble and Huff tune on the Have a Merry Chess Christmas sampler) and Throwing Muses and “Santa” (on the 1988 Winter Warnerland promo record).

This season there is a blizzard of Christmas releases out there. Added to last year’s flurry of new albums — such as Randy Travis’s AnOld Time Christmas(Warner Bros.), Wynton Marsalis’s Crescent City Christmas Card (CBS) and (gag) New Kids on the Block’s Merry, Merry Christmas (CBS) — will be holiday discs from jazz vocalist Joe Williams, the Roches, Charlie Daniels and Steve Warriner. And almost every label has a sampler. CBS is putting out Acoustic Christmas (with both archival and new cuts from Poi Dog Pondering, the Hooters and Wynton Marsalis), A Jazzy Wonderland (with Harry Connick Jr. and Branford Marsalis, Nancy Wilson, Joey DeFrancesco) and a Rhino-esque wacky sampler. Other labels’ artist-roster collections include Yule Struttin (Blue Note), Christmas in the City (Epic), Just in Time for Christmas (I.R.S.) andWinter Soltice III (Windham Hill). Rhino has fortified its broad catalogue of holiday compilations (everything from Bummed Out Christmas, a collection of holiday down-and-outers, to Hillbilly Holiday) with Billboard’s Greatest Country Christmas Hits (featuring Ernest Tubb, Johnny Cash, Buck Owen and Jimmy Dean) and Billboard’s Greatest R&B Christmas Hits (a thin sampler highlighted by the Jackson Five’s “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”).

Where should you begin? Making a shortlist is tough for me, because I have more than seventy holiday recordings and I’m now picking through the minutiae. Remember, I have a ninety-minute tape to fill every year for the rest of my life. I don’t think everyone needs to own Jacob Miller’s Rasta-holiday record, Natty X-mas (RAS), but I do believe that “All I Want for Ismas Is Collie Herb” is the ultimate cover of “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.” And I’m not sure Dr. Demento Presents the Greatest Christmas Novelty CD (Rhino) is absolutely essential, but I doubt whether I could live without “Jingle Bells” by the Singing Dogs.

Depending on what kind of music you like, I’d start by choosing among Winston’s December (new age), A Very Special Christmas (Eighties pop), A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector (Sixties pop), Ray Charles: The Spirit of Christmas (soul vocal), Ella Fitzgerald Wishes You a Swinging Christmas (jazz vocal), Randy Travis’s An Old Time Christmas (country vocal) and one of the Rhino R&B samplers, The Best of Cool Yule or Hipster’s Holiday.

From there, go in whatever direction your taste takes you. Most of the durable vocalists have made a Christmas album, though many of them weren’t recorded in the artist’s representative style. All the major Motowners made holiday records, but only Smokey Robinson’s, the Temptations’ and the Jackson Five’s sound completely like them: The others have been smothered in string arrangements. Frank Sinatra and Nat “King” Cole have several recordings each, and James Brown made three holiday records, now collected on Santa’s Got a Brand New Bag (Rhino). Among country artists, Johnny Cash and George Strait have made good, traditional records, and Warner/Nashville has put out two progressive country samplers under the title A Christmas Tradition.Instrumentally, Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas (Fantasy) and Chet Baker and Christopher Mason’s Silent Nights (Rounder) are both pretty special, as is Jingle Bell Jazz (CBS), a compilation of two label-roster samplers from the early Sixties and the early Eighties. For R&B fans, the old Stax Christmas samplers are now collected under the title It’s Christmas Time Again (Fantasy).

As for Springsteen’s “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” it was inexplicably not included on his live triple-CD set and remains one of the few really great Christmas tunes that isn’t in print. It has been released twice as a single, but the only album version is on the 1981 Children’s Television Workshop record In Harmony 2 (CBS). You’ll find that in the children’s section, if you find it at all.

And as for my brother-in-law … well, he and my sister-in-law divorced before a clear winner in the battle of the brown-nosers could be chosen. I inherited his namesake coffee cup, but I’ve had to carve my own niche in the family after all. The “Not-So-White Christmas” tape is the only physical evidence left of his once-substantial role in the family. For that reason, I suspect it will always have a stronger emotional impact than any tape I can make.