This is really a New Year’s song, but it’s been adapted into English as the Carol of the Bells or the Ukranian Bell Carol, and is indelibly associated with Christmas over here and especially in the States where various English-language Christmassy versions exist (you may especially remember it from Home Alone, or that might just be me).
This isn’t the best video in the world, but it’s the most charming version musically, so I hope you forgive the shakiness. If not, you are allowed to cheat and watch the Muppets version instead.
You might not have heard of Carlos Galhardo, but in his day his lively radio hits made him a star in his home country of Brazil. Boas Festas was composed by his friend Assis Valente and first recorded in 1933, when Galhardo was just twenty. It took me a long time to find a Christmas song from South America that wasn’t Spanish or Portuguese in origin, but since Galhardo and Valente were both born in Brazil and lived there all their lives I think Boas Festas counts as authentically Brazilian.
I haven’t been able to find a convincing translation for the whole song, but I am fairly confident that the title translates as “Happy Holidays”. If you are good at Portuguese <COUGH Sam>, please feel free to send me a translation or stick it in the comments below. Otherwise, just enjoy the music.
This is the perfect song to start with. Not only is it from Lapland (well, Finland anyway), it is also absolutely lovely (especially from 1:50 onwards), and – this is my favourite part – it is about Tonttu the Christmas Gnome. Why don’t we have a Christmas gnome in the UK? Perhaps I will start a campaign.
There’s an English translation of the lyrics here (scroll down).
For this year’s advent calendar we are stretching our wings and travelling around the world in search of Christmas songs from twenty-four different countries. Some you will know, some you will know by a different name, some you will be delighted to hear for the first time and some you might not be. Europe is over-represented, but I think we’ve got something from every continent.
OK, there isn’t a winner, I just couldn’t resist the headline. As I said before, I didn’t really have a plan as to which song went where on the advent calendar this year, but I did promise myself that if anyone voted for my personal favourite, they’d get the Christmas Eve slot. So I was delighted when Donna plumped for Mistletoe and Wine, because Donna is completely lovely and utterly deserving of the final place.
Donna and I used to work together, in the first proper job I ever had. Well, second, if you count four months doing 20 hours a week in Streatham Under Fives Centre, which I’m not sure I do. This job was in a bookshop, and in the late nineties and early two thousands Donna and I had the most fun anyone has ever had at work, because she is the sweetest, silliest, most genuine, forthright and hilarious person in the world, and spending eight hours a day in her company was sheer out-and-out delight.
When good things happened to Donna she would fill the room with beams of joy so intense they felt tangible. When bad things happened to Donna she would cry, then find a way to feel better about them, usually with the accompaniment of a lot of laughter. If I was in a bad mood, I would sit and glower silently. If Donna was in a bad mood, she’d announce it, explain it and within a few minutes we’d have talked around it from every angle and both be feeling better.
Everyone should have a Donna, especially if they are occasionally inclined to unhealthy levels of cynicism and negativity. Donna was so open and so engaged that I couldn’t sustain my sneering teenage posture, and had no choice but to become nicer, and for that I will always be grateful to her.
Happy Christmas, Donna! And happy Christmas to everyone who has read any of this year’s advent calendar. It’s been a lot of fun to do, and I’m only sorry that there wasn’t room for all the songs people nominated. But, you know, there’s always room for Cliff.
Niamh is my sister-in-law, as of thirty-four days ago. She said:
I love Driving Home for Christmas by Chris Rea. I love to hear it on the days leading up to the main event, when you finish work and all the shopping is done!
For most of us, today is hopefully one of those days. I finish work this afternoon, and I have done all my shopping already, although some of it isn’t coming until tomorrow, EEK.
I expect Niamh finished all her shopping a month ago, because Niamh is incredibly organised, which I think you probably have to be if you’ve got a house and a job and a husband and two teenage sons, who are not only involved in about twenty out-of-school activities each, but are two of the nicest teenage boys you could ever imagine meeting. When I first met them they were 9 and 13 and they were lovely, and now they’re 13 and 17 they are, unbelievably, still lovely, and also very funny and grown-up. I don’t know how she does what she does, but I hope it runs in the family, because if we can one day raise children half as nice as Niamh’s, and if we can do it with as much wit and warmth as she does, we’ll be doing well.
So happy Christmas Niamh, to you and all the family. Christmas has crept up on us a bit this year, but we’ll be back in Dublin soon!
Lucy gave me several songs to choose from, but she will forever be associated in my mind with George Michael, and since we were both supposed to see him sing this year and neither of us did, I have chosen this, which I also know is lots of other people’s favourite Christmas song too. It is an excellent Christmas song, and although you have to sit through an ad to watch it, it’s worth it because the video is even better. It has the best hair – and the most hair – of any video I can think of, not including November Rain.
(Goes off into 9-minute November Rain reverie. God, I love November Rain, about as much as I love Phantom of the Opera, and for most of the same reasons. I still can’t believe we didn’t have it as our wedding song. It’s set at a wedding! And we got married in November!)
<Cough> Sorry, where was I? Oh yes, George Michael. I love George Michael, but not as much as Lucy does. Lucy and I were at university together. We weren’t in the same year or doing the same subject, but we were both subversive leftie troublemakers so we got to know each other anyway, and then we got to like each other because – I hope nobody takes offence at my saying this – not ALL subversive leftie troublemakers have much lightness of heart or sense of the ridiculous, and Lucy had, and has, both, and was, and is, one of the funniest people I know.
(I think I treasure funny above almost anything else, when it comes to my friends. I mean, always assuming they’re not actual murderers or Tories or anything.)
Lucy lives miles away now – or else I do, or else we both do – so I never see her, but we are still in touch and we have a shared history that means a lot to us both (marginally more to her, perhaps, since she is married to a part of it) and I know that if we bumped into each other tomorrow we’d pick up exactly where we left off. I’m not sure where that was, but I’m fairly certain that wine was involved, and I’m almost sure that it would be again. Ah, good times.
Mum wanted “When Santa Got Stuck Up The Chimney – with actions”. I can’t imagine it’s actually her favourite Christmas song, and at one point I thought I might actually have to record myself performing it, but then this little girl came to my rescue.
Which is not to say I don’t know the actions. I know the actions to every song, because I am the daughter of a mother who ran music groups for children through most of my childhood. She is also the reason I know proper Christmas songs as well as Wizzard and Slade, because when I was little she used to play LPs of real choirs singing in Latin, in between Dad playing Roberta Flack on the piano or Davy Graham on the guitar. They also sang in a choir (“Oh MUM, do we HAVE to come to your concert?”), and at the summer camps we used to go to in Wales, and at our wedding (and at their wedding), so if you have enjoyed any bits of any of the Gladallover musical advent calendars over the years, you really have my parents to thank for it.
Happy Christmas, Mum!
P.S. Dad doesn’t do Twitter or Facebook, but I am reliably informed that he enjoyed this clip very much recently, and as it’s Christmas I don’t see why there can’t be two songs today:
I have a confession to make. Weeks ago, as I was putting this selection of songs together and trying to determine the order, and deciding whether it was ever OK to have two songs for the same person (no!) or two people for the same song (no!), I thought to myself what I will do, though, is put Krista and Mike on the same day so I can write about them together, but I’ll give them a song each.
And then last night I went back through the song list, ready to write this post, and I realised that Mike’s “O Come O Come Emmanuel” is, of course, the same song as Ed’s “Veni Veni Emmanuel” from three days ago.
So instead of doing the same song three days apart, I will refer you back to Ed’s post for Mike’s choice, and here treat you to Krista’s, which is, I think, the happiest song so far, and since Krista might just be the happiest person I know, that is entirely appropriate.
Mike and Krista are our longest-married friends, and if we can do it half as well as them we’ll be delighted. They are one of those couples who exude warmth, and everyone who meets them can’t help but fall in love with them. A few months ago Krista and I were at our friend Kate’s house and Krista was telling us about a job interview she’d had. “They seemed to like me”, she said, and Kate and I looked at each other and laughed, because the idea of anyone’s meeting Krista and not liking her is so ridiculous. She is, they both are, two of the loveliest people you could ever hope to meet, and I feel very lucky to be their friend, because we figured out the other day that the reason we know each other is that my ex boyfriend’s brother’s best friend’s wife’s sister’s husband used to work with Krista, which is the kind of connection that won’t always sustain for years. But this one has, and for that I am super grateful.
I gave quite a lot of thought to who went where on my advent songs countdown. I wanted to make sure it didn’t look as though the most important people were going last, because they aren’t – it’s sort of half random and half based on how much I like the songs, with a vague effort not to have people who know each other well on consecutive days, in case it gets boring or repetitive.
But it was easy to figure out where to put Niall, because today we have been married for exactly one month. What is the month anniversary? If there isn’t an official one-month-married present, I hereby declare one month the champagne and sausages anniversary.
There’s lots I could say about Niall, but it would be cheesy and naff, so I will just say that he is in every possible way the exact person I want to be married to, even though he picked this song, “if only”, as he put it, “for this magnificently drunken rendering”.
Happy Christmas, Niall! I’ll get the sausages if you get the champagne.
Glad All Over 