19 December 2008

Bren's Top 10 Favorite Holiday songs, #'s 7, 6, 5

7. Snoopy vs. The Red Baron, The Royal Guardsmen - How great is this song? I had totally forgotten about this when it came on the radio the other day. It's a great childhood memory, love the drums, love the bells, love the flying Beagle. Yeah, so this would never have happened in war. Snoopy couldn't really fly a plane, either - and there were documented examples of de facto cease fires at Christmas time on the Western Front, so we'll go with a little unlikelihood at the holidays.

6. We Need a Little Christmas, from "Auntie Mame" - "For I've grown a little leaner/ Grown a little colder/ Grown a little sadder/ Grown a little older..." I love this song, and particularly this version with Lucille Ball in the role of Mame, becaused it's suffused with melancholy but is ultimately fun and joyous. "Shake it off!" it's saying, "How bad can it be?" In this recession year it's good to remember that other times were as bad or worse, that this too shall pass, and that we need joyful punctuation marks in the sentences of our lives. And this is possibly the gayest holday song ever, in the gay culture sense of the word, so it has earned a place!

5. Silent Night - I chose this version of the thousands out there because sistah really lets the beauty of the song and her voice come out. It's such a gentle, sleepy, moving song, written for strings, and the 'ukulele and her voice seem perfect for it. And it's in 'olelo Hawai'i, which fits cuz it's such a universal song. Orignially it was written for guitar, in German, so why not 'ukulele in 'olelo? Just beautiful.

1 comment:

hina333 said...

better late than never to respond- one of my all time favorites- more so in Hawaiian!