[Kylie Minogue seems to have established almost a mini-career our of camping it up while singing “Santa Baby”; I must have found dozens of videos — “official” and otherwise — of her performing it at one venue or another. This is my favorite, shot at a concert for troops serving with the International Force East Timor (INTERFET) in 1999. It’s just soooo cheesily reminiscent of some of the musical acts (Joey Heatherton, Jayne Mansfield, etc.) which I remember from televised Bob Hope Christmas specials in the 1960s. And yeah, I know: it’s definitely not in sync with current standards of enlightened, socially conscious professional performances. Maybe the winking humor of it all is actually an oblique acknowledgment that Yes, yes, we know this is over the top… but it’s for the boys, so it’s okay! I’ll probably regret posting it here within five minutes of hitting the Publish button.]

Greetings — and welcome once again to the annual Running After My Hat Christmas-music “extravaganza”! This year, I’m finally getting back to adding new songs to the annual list (hooray!)… with some differences (hmm…?!?).

First, and most obviously, I’m switching this year to an embedded Spotify playlist; feel free to listen to it while I continue to rattle on about peripheral matters (and feel free to disregard the peripheral matters). Below, you’ll find this year’s list (external link to Spotify, in case you want to listen to it outside RAMH) — and for you oldtimers, please don’t be alarmed (as I kinda am!) by the obvious differences in presentation and interface:

…and here’s the complete list going back to 2008, now containing 140 songs — including this year’s additions and replacements — for over seven hours of background music (external link to Spotify):

Now, about those differences (with apologies for the obsessively fussy tech talk)…

• I really wanted to get away from having to upload new songs to the Running After My Hat server every year. I don’t mind doing that, as such, but it has become such a pain to offer the playlist here as I’ve done it in prior years; it requires fairly extensive and definitely error-prone editing of raw HTML code. With a Spotify playlist, I basically just drop the link to Spotify and it all just works, somehow.
• But using Spotify comes with some downsides, too:
  • The streaming service needs a license from the music’s rights holder to stream tracks. Inevitably, some tracks I’d always felt free to include before — because they were all from my own music collection of CDs and MP3s — have simply never been licensed by Spotify, for one reason or another. So the Spotify playlist has invisible gaps where those songs were. (You won’t hear the gaps; I’ve tried to substitute tracks to sorta-kinda recreate the “feel” of the missing items.)
  • Annoyingly, I do not think you’ll be able to shuffle the order in which songs are played. (I can do it myself when I listen to it outside of RAMH, but apparently that option is not currently available for embedded playlists like the two shown above.) If you want the shuffle option, you’ll have to go to the last Christmas-music playlist I added music to — that would’ve been the 2020 edition — and click the little “Popout” button on the audio player. Just understand, again, that for now any further songs I add each year will never be added to the old player. (Still: 130 songs! seven hours of playing time!)

Enough of that for now.

…except to let you know that you can see the complete list of all tracks in the playlist, through this year (and including the ones missing from the Spotify version), by clicking here.

This year’s playlist includes a clutch of favorite artists from previous lists — Perry Como, Loreena McKennitt, Elvis, Anonymous 4 — but also a mix of new names (some of them you’ll probably never see again) and names I was surprised never to have seen in prior years, given the Christmas music which The Missus and I have accumulated for ourselves: the Carpenters; José Feliciano; Porter Music Box Company. And how could I not have included Judy Garland’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”—?

Oh. Wait. Right. I actually did include it — in fact, it sat there right at the outset: December, 2008: a YouTube clip of the scene in Meet Me in St. Louis in which her character Esther sings it to her little sister “Tootie.”

(If you actually visit that post now, by the way, you’ll see that it’s broken in a variety of ugly ways (although I did repair the broken video link). Victim — like many of us — of technology evolving beyond our reach!)

One artist’s name I truly did not recognize: the Roddy Doyle Trio. As far as I can tell, this is not the Booker Prize-winning Roddy Doyle who’s written many novels for adults and children. (I thought it might be that RD, because I know he’s interested in and has written about music. But I’ve found no indication that he plays in a trio by that name. As for the trio, I’ve found no discography which names their personnel. A mystery for now!)

Enjoy the music — don’t worry about listening to it here; just bookmark the Spotify links, put it on in the background, and get on with your holiday. And enjoy the rest of 2023, with my thanks for visiting!