A Quirky Eclectic Christmas Mix (2019 Ed.)

[Video: “Santa Claus Is Watching You,” by Ray Stevens. (Lyrics here and elsewhere.) Among its charms, the song has Santa’s sleigh towed not by eight, but by about two dozen reindeer, not all of them likely to be tiny. Rudolph isn’t among them, having been tasked with a surveillance project.]

Welcome! Please dip your head when passing below the tacked-up greenery overhead here in the foyer — I’ve worked forever on that, and it just won’t stay in place…

As always beginning in 2008, I’ve added ten new songs; the list therefore now includes 120 songs (well, the first just a scrap of dialogue). Total time required to listen to the whole thing, start-to-finish: now around six-and-a-half hours of music. This means that — unless you’re interested in only this year’s ten — the best way to play the whole thing is in random order, as background so to speak. Then you can just close this window.

Yes, I know, bloggers are not really known for their eagerness to see you out the door. Consider it a holiday treat from me (heh).

So, first, here’s the complete playlist, presented in random order. Note: you can open it in a pop-out window by clicking (duh) the little “Popout” button at the top left (that’s the way to go, in my opinion) and if you don’t like this random order, just reload the page:  

…or, if you’re in a hurry, here are the ten 2019 selections only. Unlike the complete list, this player just runs through the songs in sequential order:

In either case, or even if you don’t want to listen at all, you might want to glance at the complete current list of song titles and performers. (Note: this is just a listing; you cannot play music from it.)

If you’re interested in why I recommend the random order, you can always check the 2018 post; it lays out my reasons in probably excruciating detail.

Enough of the mechanics, already: on to some thoughts which this year’s list engendered…

This year’s cycle differs from the previous ones, primarily, in my mindset while prepping it — in restless things rustling in the back of my head, and a few other things clattering about in the foreground. Not to melodramatize, but all these might be summed up as: I don’t know how much longer I can do this.

Oh, I’m not going anywhere so to speak; no, it’s just that this year… well, to put it mildly (and briefly), call me not merely preoccupied, but flat-out exhausted.

From another perspective, though, I’m soon literally going somewhere: sailing into retirement in March, and headed overseas a couple months later. All of which should go a long way to making next year’s list a lot a little hypothetically easier to put together. Guess we’ll just have to wait to see what develops!

As for the specifics of this year’s playlist…

Probably my favorite addition is Celtic Thunder’s “Christmas 1915.” The song — its full title is “Silent Night (Christmas 1915)” — was written sometime around 1990 by Irish songwriter Cormac MacConnell, pictured at right; you can read his own thoughts about the composition here and here, at the IrishCentral site. (MacConnell very much likes a rendition by Jerry Lynch, but I couldn’t find that version in digital form to include in the playlist.) And if you’re unfamiliar with the lyrics, you can find a version of them here.

The song may strike you as an odd addition to a playlist for a holiday often characterized as one of good cheer, glad tidings, so on and so forth. But something about it struck a chord in me here in 2019, with “things” what they are especially in the English-speaking world. We do seem to teeter on a fulcrum: which way will we tilt, finally? will it be life, then? or death, after all? Like many people, I’ve begun to lose confidence in the answer.

And yet, as the cliche goes, we’re not there yet. So I myself choose for now to just set the playlist on random, and go about the everyday, near-term business of voting for life.

As always, thanks for visiting Running After My Hat. Here’s to another year, for now, of looking for — and in my experience still finding, more often than not, even now — the very best in one another!