This is the only Christmas song released during my record-buying lifetime which sounds like an instant Christmas classic; as though you must have heard it before, probably performed by Brenda Lee or the Rockettes. But no: it’s just a properly good Christmas song from Mariah Carey.

(Actually it’s not the only one – Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End), which we had last year, is an utterly authentic glam rock Christmas hit.)

Hurray! This is just lovely.  I do like Johnny Mathis’s weird voice.

There doesn’t seem to be an official video available for this song, but I like this one because it has a bunch of old photos of Queen, which serve to remind us that however odd-looking the surviving members may be now, they were much odder-looking in their youth.

I fully support the sentiment expressed in this song.

This is a slight cheat, because we had it last year. I haven’t run out of ideas, it’s just that this song is so good and makes me so happy that I couldn’t bear to leave it out. To begin with I thought I’d use a different version, at least, but none of them is nearly as good as this. So here’s Andy Williams with the gorgeous Sleigh Ride. Enjoy.

The video for this song is a bit weird and sad; I don’t think I’d seen it before (or at least, I hadn’t been paying attention). It is one of the funnest ones to sing along to, though, despite being about war. Altogether now: dum-a-dum-a-dum dum, dum-a-dum-a-dum, dum-a-dum dum dum-a-dum dum-a-dum-a-dum…

I was going to use an older version of this song, but actually I really like the Destiny’s Child version (it is a hundred times better than their horrid reworking of The Twelve Days of Christmas), and the video is very cute.

(I’m out of the country for a few days after today, and I’m going to try scheduling the next four posts in advance, so if they appear at odd times or not at all, that’s why.)

A small piece of shameless self-promotion: if you haven’t already, do take a look at A long succession of thin evenings, the latest addition to my ever-expanding publishing empire. It’s a place for reviews of live music, theatre and comedy in London, and it’s an experiment in collaborative blogging. If you’d like to submit a review for publication there, let me know.

I love, love, love this gorgeous video. There are many great things about it, but the best is that all four members of Boney M dance their way through the song, and even though the women’s capes are so voluminous that all you can really see is a bit of bobbing, you can tell they’re giving it their all, under those swathes of fur. Good on you, women members of Boney M!

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One of the headlines in Radio 4’s 8am news today was that an academic at Durham University has “discovered” that While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks was once sung to the tune of On Ilkley Moor Baht ‘At. They could have saved themselves the bother of doing the research by talking to me, any of my family members or most of the people I know, all of whom have been singing it to that tune for as long as I can remember. And to prove we’re not a relic of a bygone age, here is a choir called the DWS Chorale doing exactly the same thing, with variations.

(I know I only said yesterday that this was a pop advent calendar, but I like to be topical, and if there really are only thirty people in Britain who know you can sing While Shepherds Watched to the tune of On Ilkley Moor Baht ‘At then I’d like to spread the news, because it’s much more fun than singing it to the usual tune.)