The Restless Hearts Christmas Mixtape

Orchestrated, Edited, and Introduced by Rob Goodale

I love talking about Christmas traditions. It’s one of my favorite conversational diving boards from which to leap when getting to know somebody; there is a treasure trove of delicious personhood wrapped up in childhood holiday habits. It is a certain type of person from a certain type of family who steadfastly attended Midnight Mass every year on Christmas Eve; this certain type of person is radically different from the “Early” Christmas Eve Mass attendee, who is yet again vastly different from the Christmas-Morning-Or-Bust types.

Going to see Santa Claus at the mall, baking cookies, building snow forts, caroling at nursing homes -- each of these celebratory details reveals something important, and from time to time leads to a delightful conversation wherein someone tries to explain Elf on the Shelf to someone else who has mercifully never heard of such chicanery.

As far as I’m concerned, conversations about the Feast of the Nativity of the Lord begin and end with music, sung at top volume -- at church, in the car, in the kitchen, always at top volume. In the Goodale household, it wasn’t really Christmas until the dulcet tones of Harry Connick, Jr.’s When My Heart Finds Christmas came wafting through the air. To this day, that version of “Sleigh Ride,” with its blaring horns, is the only version I am ever really capable of enjoying.

In recent years, I’ve discovered some beloved Christmas albums of my own: Josh Garrels’ hauntingly beautiful The Light Came Down, Penny & Sparrow’s Christmas Songs, A Johnnyswim Christmas, which is just delightful, and of course, The Oh Hellos’ Family Christmas Album.

I was prepared to go through my own top whatever number of Christmas songs and rant for about 15,000 words about all the stuff I like. Then I thought better of it, in large part because I imagine I am the only one in the entire world who is interested in hearing me do that.

Instead, we rallied the Restless Hearts troops, from the wizened, weary veterans to the fresh recruits, and asked them to share their favorite holiday tunes. As it turns out, not all of them feel the same way about Christmas music.

For the Liturgically Appropriate Among Us

Dan: So “Silent Night” certainly has that old, classic, even mildly cliched feel to it, coming from ages-old Germany. And for those of us who don’t speak German, hearing it with its original German lyrics is something. "Silent Night / Night of Silence" is a newer spin on the time-tested favorite that mixes a slightly more upbeat, punchy sets of lyrics with the more solemn, reflective tone of the original using the same chords and key. The songs can be melded together to even build to an overlaid counterpoint. The choir at my childhood parish would sing it regularly, and the layered pieces bring both musical and nostalgic joy to my ears and heart.

Jenny: Gaudete, Gaudete! Who doesn’t love a rousing 16th century Latin carol? Seriously, have your flagons of mead ready at hand for this one. Translating to “Rejoice, rejoice!”, this hymn is a song of welcome to God born of the Virgin, coming to renew the world. In addition to being a great Christmas song, it came to be a favorite of those in the Echo program when we would absurdly celebrate all the year’s holidays throughout the course of the summer. If you lack flagons of mead, here’s another, tamer version that would be better paired with eggnog.

Erin: My favorite Christmas song is (and this will come as a surprise to no one) strongly influenced by the one and only Father Greg Boyle. I’ve never been a huge Christmas hymn person, but in his chapter on “Kinship” in Tattoos on the Heart, Boyle talks about why "O Holy Night" is one of his favorite hymns, and I’ve never looked back. He focuses on the lines: “Long lay the world in sin and error pining -- ‘til He appeared and the soul felt its worth.” Jesus shows up in our lives and all of a sudden, we feel worthy. This is powerful stuff. Boyle takes it beyond just Jesus’ love and presence, however, explaining that making the soul feel it’s worth is “the job description of human beings seeking kinship.” Our job, in the Christmas season and always, is to make the souls of those around us feel their worth. (Full disclosure, in this passage G also talks about listing to his mom Kathleen Conway Boyle sing the song when he was a child, which may have influenced my fascination.)

A Moment to Consider the Existential Happiness of Elves

Laura: Do all elves have as their telos the making of toys? This is the question raised by Barenaked Ladies’ "Elf's Lament". Is it inherently an elfin vocation to construct gifts for wide-eyed "nice" children, or is the workforce at the North Pole more akin to "indentured servitude," as the song claims? While I'm not the biggest fan of the Rudolph movie, this question was approached via the ostracization of the dentist elf, Hermey.

This is really a silly song, but I enjoy it because it exposes the incoherence of the general secular mythos we have built up around Santa -- an incoherence I'm weighing as we have to make the decision whether to buy into it fully, and how much we could relate it to the real and saintly person of Nicholas of Myra or the consummate self-gift of the Christ child. The song also contains a simple social justice appeal: requesting consciousness of the cost of the gifts you request to those who might manufacture them.

Sweet, Sweet Pangs of Nostalgia

Dan: I’m not a huge Christmas music guy. I don’t love that one radio station that plays it 24/7 starting in November. A pinch of Christmas music as I pass in and out of stores or take a short car ride with someone else controlling the radio is plenty for me. But before I was old enough to have strong opinions about music, and before cars had aux cords and CD players, we had one cassette that lived in our tape deck for the winter: John Denver & The Muppets’ Christmas album (full album here). It’s full of classics that are thoroughly seared into my memory. While “Christmas is Coming” will plant the most delightfully pesky earworm, it’s their rendition of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" that is the flagship song for the album. It features many of the great characters from Muppet lore, most notably the ever-diva Miss Piggy who croons loudly, “Fiiiiiiiiive, gooooooooold, riiiiiiiiiiiings,” which eventually comes with a punchy “buh-dum, bum, bum.” I dare you to listen. Merry Christmas!

Laura: This is certainly my entry from Nostalgiaville. My dad put on the Christmas album from Glad, a Christian a cappella group, every Christmas morning since I can remember (but never before). It was a peaceful bellwether of the Christmas season's arrival after all the anticipation of Advent. The full album is excellent, but my favorite track is this rendition of "Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow", an African-American spiritual. If anyone truly internalized the hope offered to the lowliest of society through the angels' invitation to seek the infant Jesus, it was the slave, and that reads through in the simple but heartfelt lyrics.

Erin: One of the Christmas songs I remember most fondly from my childhood is "I Want a Hippopotamus For Christmas". My brother and I discovered this song on a CD of weird Christmas songs (think... “All I Want For Christmas is My Two Front Teeth” and “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer”) that we picked up from the library one year and then every year thereafter. And although I had no particular fascination with these “hippo heros,” something about sitting around our house at Christmastime listening to a whiny child’s voice sing about how “only a hippopotamus will do” and how “there’s lots of room for him in our two-car garage” will forever be cemented in my memory.

Spanish Renaissance Hymns Performed by The Monkees

Jenny: Here’s another Renaissance hymn: Ríu Ríu Chíu. My favorite version of this Spanish hymn comes from an unexpected source: the 1960s boy band, the Monkees. Besides being a super chill and beautiful song to listen to, the lyrics are also epic. It talks about God protecting the ewe from the wolf (the Immaculate Conception), and how the infinite God redeems us by making Himself small. Plus, you have to appreciate the really campy 60s video.

Beware: Here Be Scrooges

Tim: Bah, humbug!

Dave: I’ll confess. I don’t really dig Christmas music outside of liturgical settings. But one song beyond all others drives me crazy: "Wonderful Christmastime" by Paul McCartney. I despise this tune so much that I start foaming at the mouth whenever the synthesized beep-boops begin. The good knight’s iconic song is the singular reason why I avoid Christmas radio, and stick to my alternative/indie rock station, which refuses to succumb to the possibility of its cacophonous waves being transmitted all across Portland. I shall also confess that in the realm of popular Christmas music, I love Hanson, the extremely underrated creators of “MmmBop” and “Penny and Me” (they also have a wonderful cover of U2’s “In a Little While”).

So as to not go Scrooging all over the place, my two favorite hymns are “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” and “People Look East”. Seriously, check out that latter video; the choir of kiddos from the famed Ely Cathedral in England absolutely slay (“sleigh”) it. I find that the first carol perfectly sums up the archetypal imagery of light shattering darkness, and I can’t help but consider Tupac’s “The Rose the Grew from Concrete” whenever I hear it. “People Look East,” on the other hand, takes various images of Christ, and offers metaphors for the various Loves that the Christ child embodies: Love the Guest, Love the Rose, Love the Bird, Love the Star, Love the Lord. Nothing short of gorgeous.

Tim: … Fine, I guess if I'm not the only scrooge in this group, I don't have any excuse.

I don't really like listening to Christmas music. I do, however, enjoy singing it, and one of my favorite Christmas songs to sing is "Adeste Fideles/ O Come All Ye Faithful". My affection for the song may stem at least in part from my appreciation for Latin, but I think on a deeper level, I like that the song -- the opening verse, at least -- feels like an invitation. It doesn't start with the "Christmas spirit" in full force, but rather builds toward it. The song starts with a feeling of anticipation and restrained excitement as it invites the listener to come and see and wonder at the newborn king of angels, and only in the following verses arrives at the fuller sense of joy that we associate with Christmas.

Another Christmas song that I rather enjoy singing is "Good King Wenceslaus", which I enjoy partly because of a sentimental attachment. Back in my undergraduate days at ND, I was part of a group that walked around St. Mary's Lake every Sunday evening praying the Rosary, and after the trip that followed the first snowfall of the year, we would sing this carol. After 20 minutes of trudging through the cold and snow, following in the footprints of those ahead of us, the lyrics felt quite appropriate.

Merry Christmas from The Restless Hearts crew!