If you are young and hip like me you probably read today’s song title and thought aha! that Justin Bieber song! But although I like Justin Bieber and it is Christmassy, that song is also rubbish so I haven’t chosen it.

This song is an entirely different and much more delightful number by the Indigo Girls, whom I first encountered in my first term at university, which was also about the time I discovered that you could be gay and politically active and in a band and a GIRL. Heady days. In that first term we had a flatmate on a – secondment? Internship? What do you call it when you study somewhere else for a term? Anyway she was doing one of those – called Leanne, who was kooky and left-wing and a feminist and from somewhere like, but not actually, Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin (which, I’ve just discovered, is a real place and not just from Annie Hall) and she was super cool. And she used to play us the Indigo Girls, which meant they were super cool too. And twenty-something years later, they still are.

This song is from their 2010 Christmas album Holly Happy Days (all American musicians make Christmas albums, I have discovered, even the super cool ones) and it’s really a love song rather than an overtly Christmas-themed one, but it’s called “Mistletoe” and it’s on a Christmas album and more importantly it’s great, so we’re having it anyway.