Christmas Mixes

Every year I make a mix CD [edit: ok, it’s not a physical CD anymore] of Christmas music and force copies of it upon family and friends, saying “but this is GOOD Christmas music, you’ll like it, it doesn’t have Jingle Bells on it, there’s a song with a banjo!” Some people find this convincing and agree to take a copy.

Despite personally celebrating Christmas in a thoroughly secular fashion, I love good versions of of traditional hymns. When I’m searching for music for the Mix, I look for covers of hymns and some traditional Christmas songs that stand out as a little different, and original songs about the Christmas season. I avoid upbeat songs about Santa because I loathe them. The Santa myth is my least favourite thing about Christmas.

I got better at them as I went along, but if you want to click around and listen to some of the past year’s mixes, you can find them all here: the 2008 Mix, the 2009 Mix, the 2010 Mix, the 2011 Mix, the 2012 Mix, the 2013 Mix, the 2014 Mix, the 2015 Mix, the 2016 Mix, the 2017 Mix – then I moved to Spotify for the 2018 Mix, the 2019 Mix, took a pandemic break in 2020, then the 2021 Mix and the 2022 Mix.

When I paused in 2020, I considered stopping altogether. I really enjoyed the process of making a physical CD and designing a cover, burning the CDs and scribbling the year on them with a sharpie, and making the mix digitally doesn’t feel the same. However as Christmas approached in 2021 I found myself gathering Christmas tunes again that I thought would go well in the mix. It’s become a bit of a summertime habit. Long live the Christmas Mix.