Christmas With Bing Crosby

In December 1992 I bought a Christmas cd in a small music shop in a shopping mall in Belgium. Christmas with Bing Crosby, Bing smiling in his bow tie on the cover. You can't get this cd in the shops anymore, it is one of the seven or eight million Bing Christmas cds which are now out of print, replaced every year by new compilations with a different picture of Bing smiling on the cover and the songs rearranged in a slightly different order, with titles like Bing Crosby's Christmas and Bing's Christmas Shindig and Groove Armada Pimp Bing Crosby's White Christmas Feat. Rihanna and Butt Naked Bing Crosby Goes Jesus. Checking on Amazon, I found my cd - out of print - with the same cover and title, but with different songs, and a release date of 1994. Obviously in 1994 they couldn't find a different picture for that year's compilation.

Years later I bought another Bing Christmas cd in an attempt to broaden my Christmas song horizons, but as this one was entitled Winter Wonderland, with Christmas not mentioned, the compilers, while predominately filling the album with Christmas tracks, also snuck in some non-Christmas cheer, including a syrupy awful piece of mince called Children, which is a launch-a-rocket-at-the-cd-player song if ever there was one; The Way We Were, and there's just no excuse for The Way We Were under any circumstances; and Hoagy Carmichael's In The Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening, which is a great song but a great song for a summer evening. Not winter and not Christmas. I came back to Christmas With Bing Crosby, and here we are in December and once more it is ever-present on the cd player.

So here they are, those songs on Christmas With Bing Crosby in full:

1. White Christmas: One verse, just fifty-three words. But have you ever heard a version of White Christmas that didn't go on for about six minutes? That's because it's soooo.......slooooow..... One day White Christmas is just going to explode and no one will ever be able to hear the song again.

2. Silent Night: It's not rock 'n roll, but you can't argue with Silent Night.

3. It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas: Includes the great line, "There's a tree in the Grand Hotel, one in the park as well, the sturdy kind that doesn't mind the snow..." What kind of stupid Christmas tree does mind the snow? Do you think Bing ever said, 'I'm not singing that, it's pish!" Maybe he did. He let that one by though.

4. Little Jack Frost Get Lost: A duet with Peggy Lee. The kind of song that says picture-perfect 1950's America, where nothing bad ever happens and everybody's happy. Those were the days when "the bench in the park is all alone in the dark" because it's cold, rather than because if you go into the park after dark you'll get knifed.

5. Medley: Good King Wenceslas/ We Three Kings/ Angels We Have Heard On High: We were singing the first of these songs last week. One of Two thought it was Good King Wencesclaus. I always used to think the first line was "Good King Wencas last looked out." I never got to the third and fourth verses, so I just assumed that since it was the last time he looked out, the song was about some poor do-gooding fool of a king who went out into the cold and pegged it. I think was in my 30's before I discovered the truth.

6. Sleigh Ride: "When they're passing round the coffee and the pumpkin pie..." Iconic. Songwriting at its zenith, although who is the shadowy Farmer Grey character? And the "jing jing jing" bit at the end is annoying beyond words. So, actually, it's not really songwriting at its zenith.

7. Christmas Is A-Comin': "If you haven't got a friendly cat may God bless you..."?? "Christmas is a-comin' and the egg is in the nog..."?? What is this song even about? The Christmas song equivalent of the present of cheap aftershave.

8. Deck The Halls/ Away In A Manger/ I Saw Three Ships: With Deck The Halls, there is just far too much Fa-la-laaing. Away In A Manger I've always hated. A personal thing. I Saw Three Ships... What's really happening with this song? Given that Bethlehem's got that whole, being in the middle of the desert thing going on, where, or more likely, what are the three ships? The three wise men? The Holy Trinity? Columbus's three ships? The Three Amigos? Three horsemen of the Apocalypse? We need Dan Brown to write the book.

9. I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day: A timeless tale of the struggle between good and evil. As in all the best Hollywood movies, good wins out at the end of the day. Bing as Bruce Willis.

10. I'll Be Home For Christmas: Difficult to find any Christmas album without this heartwarming tale of a psycho-stalker serial killer on Death Row writing a letter to his next victim, telling her that she better watch out and better take care because he's coming home...for...Christmas...

11. The Twelve Days of Christmas: Drugs. There's no other explanation.

12. The Snowman: Bing's sons - "Are you ready, fellas?" "Sure, Dad!" - sing this stupid tale of a snowman which can't run and warn the family about the fire on the porch... but it can throw itself on the flames to save them all. Let him melt, that's what I say.

13. Santa Claus Is Coming To Town: Well, Bing, it's ok, but once you've heard Bruce Springsteen....

14. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen: The Bridge Over Troubled Water of Christmas carols. Bing nails it. And fortunately doesn't sing all three hundred verses.

15. The Christmas Song: This song was written to be performed in a schmoozy Brooke Benton/Luther Vandross loungebar type of way and as such deserves not to even exist. The ratio of people who listen to this song to people who have eaten chestnuts has got to be in the region of one to eight hundred gazillion.

16. Christmas in Killarny: Bing panders to the notion that there's never a bad party in Ireland.

Christmas With Bing Crosby.... as if there's any other way to spend the holiday.