And here we are, the very last Jingle Bells Friday of the season – how did it come around so soon and with the Christmas song bag still well stuffed? It’s always the way, isn’t it? The good news is that we’re only a couple of days from the solstice, the daylight has dipped to its lowest, and soon the upswing will begin – by next Thursday why, ’twill feel like the Spring is not so far away, oh yes, indeed it shall. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though – there’s still Christmas to come, and surely twelve nights of revels that will follow on as they always have, as they always shall. Timeless, this winter festival, however it may be reshaped and renamed.
What else might be happening around this time? How about the office party – grim inevitability or joyful opportunity to embarrass oneself in a way that will still be talked about next December? Or both. Whichever it is, there should be – at least some of the time – some upbeat seasonal tunes and that is exactly what Greg Antista and the Lonely Streets offer on ‘Christmas, Baby Please Come Home.‘ The band like to crank up their guitars and offer a fist punch in the air on their SoCal punk rock meets a sonic wall of alt-country mixed with grit, garage and cow-punk. It’s a lively one.
Continuing in a similar theme we find Manchester born but now Huddersfield based Kieran Doyle who has a simple wish this year that ‘Everybody Dance it’s Christmas.’ His influences span from indie and folk to Britpop and classic rock: he cites artists like Paul Weller, Noel Gallagher, Suzanne Vega, David Bowie, and The Stone Roses as inspiration. Despite a late start – Kieran didn’t get active in music until his mid-fifties – he has been active in releasing original songs since 2021.
Now we realise that we do tend to pitch a very Northern European view of the time of year – all snow hats and Woden flying through the skies distributing largess far and wide from his sleigh. It’s not like that for everyone – as Nilsen’s Southern Harmony (Bjoern Nilsen, Karren Pell) remind us on ‘You And Christmas‘ which paints a seasonal landscape of beaches and surfboards. Well, we like to be inclusive, but to be honest we don’t think it’s the place for a snowball (advocaat, lemonade, a splash of lime juice and a maraschino cherry), and what’s Christmas without a snowball?
Taking us back to that more traditional view of the season it’s probably time to dip into the Great American Songbook’s contributions to Winterval feelings. Shari Rowe is the dipper, and it’s ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas‘ that she’s put her own spin on. She says of the recording that: “‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ has always held a special place in my heart. I wanted this version to feel personal and comforting—like a quiet moment by the fire with the people you love.”
Texas Americana artist Mia Suzanne Walker want’s to take that cosy feeling just a little further, as she suggests that the season to be jolly is also an ideal time to be ‘Falling Falling Falling‘, and she doesn’t just mean the snow. Nope – that falling image is something of a metaphor: “falling like the snow – in love again, I don’t know – the last time we’ve been this close to….falling.”
And we finish Jingle Bells Friday for another year with our customary apology to everyone we didn’t manage to fit in, and also with a combination of both the downbeat depressing Christmas song (you’re welcome!) and the return of the true spirit of the season – yule love the banjo on this. This, by the by, is Old Sap’s take on the John Prine classic ‘Christmas In Prison.‘ It’s a song that Old Sap explains worked some kind of conversion on him: “I’ve had a pretty loathsome relationship with Christmas music, nine years of Catholic school, and my parents used to put the Christmas station on in the car on November 1st every year. That was all they listened to for two months. Then I worked a retail job one Christmas, and that sent me over the edge. As I get older, I’ve found more Christmas tunes I can appreciate, this is my favourite one.” There’s also a serious side to choosing this song as Old Sap notes: ““In 2025, we’re now dealing with an entirely new type of detainment and incarceration perpetrated by I.C.E. against migrant communities. He points to the first week of Border Patrol raids in North Carolina this year—Operation Charlotte’s Web—where over 370 people were detained, with 350 individuals still unaccounted for in public records. Families have not been told where their loved ones are being held. And he recalls the testimony of a Chicago-based activist describing ICE facility conditions: “There is no privacy… lights on all day and night… rooms built for 80 holding between 150–200… no working showers, no blankets, insufficient food, no toothbrushes, no medications…. They beat the shit out of these people in the street, then throw them in a room with no medical attention.” Well, Merry Christmas everybody.
And so it just remains for us to wish you, dear reader, a cool yule and a happy Hogmanay. May you avoid the dread of the annual Hootenanny, and may the first gig come early in January and make 2026 a memorable year. What, one more? Well…it’s just possible that Mince Pie Monday may return, but just in case it doesn’t, here’s Billy Bragg‘s ‘Put Christ Back Into Christmas‘ on which song he channels Woody Guthrie to call out those who hypocritically try and make political gain out of the winterval, and who don’t seem to have read very far into their favourite book as they have never heard “of the Samaritan who stops to help the stranger dressed in rags, You pay lip service to the Lord, While worshipping the flag.”
