Mitch Miller

[Video: I suspect many of us have experienced such a moment in our gift-giving lives — a moment when the giftee’s face, and perhaps their very words, say, “Oh! You’ve given me a… WHAT is this you have given me, exactly?”]

Per usual, let’s begin by putting the music itself at the top of the post (with some discussion to follow). Here are the ten selections for this year:

…and here’s the whole thing — up to 158 songs, totaling over eight hours, in this fifteenth year of this project:

[As before, I’m incredibly annoyed that you can’t shuffle the songs in an embedded playlist, like this one. But if you’ve got a Spotify account, you can open the playlist there… and shuffle it! To do so, click on the three little dots to the left of the “Play” arrowhead button; once in Spotify, just shuffle it to your heart’s content.]

Now, on to the annual nattering (heh)…

Among the surprises in this year’s list, you’ll find Chris Rea’s “Driving Home for Christmas” — which (to my delight) describes an over-the-river-and-through-the-woods drive not in the United States, but in Britain.

And there’s also Máiréad Nesbitt’s lovely violin solo, “Ériu’s Dream.” This really stands out, for me, because… well, it’s not a Christmas song. The titular Ériu serves (per Wikipedia) as the “eponymous matron goddess of Ireland,” and I can find no reference to a dream of hers. (She apparently does feature in the dreams of other Celtic figures, though.) But, I dunno — the song just seemed to me to fit here.

Perhaps her dream was one which included holly, mistletoe, and magical figures emerging from a misty, snowbound landscape? I can hear that.

Finally, I must confess: my heart did not look forward to compiling this year’s list. The reasons are partly technological, and partly… well, other than technological.

Technology: yes, I’m comfortable with tech — maybe atypically, even weirdly comfortable with it, considering my age. But I could see the handwriting on the wall, thanks to my blogging platform’s age and increasing… inflexibility? A couple years ago, fed up with the laborious process of trying out yet another music-playing plugin when all the old ones were no longer working, I finally switched over to Spotify. Which does, yes, enormously simplify creating and sharing playlists…

…at a cost of its own.

No, I don’t mean the cost of my subscription; I gladly pay that if that’s what it takes to share music here. The cost in question isn’t monetary, it’s… well, political.

The truth is, yeah, 2025 is a very dispiriting year in which this leftie American blogger finds himself living. Politics saturates everything — ugly politics, politics interlaced with capitalism, politics soaking into the season like rotgut booze in an otherwise heavenly fruitcake.

And, it turns out, even simple pleasures like sharing music can, this year, stink of politics.

It turns out, see, that some of the advertising revenue which Spotify uses to support free Spotify accounts comes from the US Department of Homeland Security. Specifically, Spotify’s free accounts may occasionally feature recruitment ads for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, a/k/a ICE. (See here (Newsweek) for some background, and here for an official response to it from — in this case — the New York City Comptroller.)

Now, you yourself should not experience these odious ads by listening to this playlist on RAMH. The question really is: should I and other paying Spotify subscribers be directing our money into the music streamer’s coffers?

I don’t think so. But switching, at this point, means finding an “untainted” streamer which offers something like Spotify’s enormous library of music, so the playlist doesn’t need to be remade — yet again — with different music.

All of which is a problem for me, not for you. So for now, anyhow, I’m just — one more time, thank you, 2025! — screaming into the void.

On that sour note, for which sourness I sincerely apologize, please do enjoy this year’s selections! And I’ll see what I can do about the Spotify issue.

[Image: the Jersey Joes, on parade (somewhere) in the 1940s-50s. Twenty years ago, I’d have said this was too blurry or grainy. Now, I think it’s just about perfect.]

You could hear them for a full minute before they came into sight. A couple of blocks away, still, the horns sounded a little tinny; the drums were a muted, basso sort of approaching rumble. As they got nearer, each breath of the brass grew both fuller and more pointed, and you could hear not just the rattle of the snare drums’ skins but the slight ticky-ticky-tick of the sticks against the chrome or stainless-steel rims…

…and then they were there, suddenly.

You’d read (so you thought) all about The War, and you’d seen the movies and TV shows about it. You knew what they looked like in their service garb back then — ten, fifteen, twenty years before: rumpled khaki or olive uniforms, the helmets dirty dinged and battered and maybe camouflage-netted or even bullet-holed, the boots like something you’d see on a dirt farmer’s feet, their hands grimy, their chins unshaven, maybe a smear of grease or mud or something worse (the photos were all black-and-white) across a cheek or forehead, their eyes the eyes of men who’d never stop wincing at the sound of a backfire. You could trace a direct line to their old uniforms from the uniforms of the Revolutionary War marchers in that Spirit of ’76 painting.

And you’d seen them as they looked since then, too, still in uniforms perhaps (but with the logos of gasoline retailers, grocery-store chains, public utilities and bus companies swapped in for the medals and insigniae of rank), still with the smear of grease across a corner of their faces, weekend Budweisers clenched in the hands which once gripped rifles, wrenches, binoculars, and maps.

All of which made their transformation on this muggy South Jersey July morning remarkable: crisp black cotton uniforms; brilliant black boots with white laces; white helmet liners; white gloves; clean and clean-shaven faces; and a distant look in their eyes… These uniforms had nothing to do with the Spirit of ’76 guys’ clothes, but these eyes came straight from those faces.

And always, always with the music, pounding, rattling the windows of the stores as they passed, vibrating through the soles of your feet, and making it impossible to remain seated on the curb.

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[Read more…]

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