Christmas is a time to sing!! 2025

[chansen]

So we're cleaning up as a family and getting ready, because we procrastinate. My wife tells Spotify to play "Christmas carols" and we start getting hymns instead. She changes the order to "Christmas songs" and that goes fine for a while, until we start getting modern country music artists singing about baby Jesus.

I get the brainwave to search Spotify on my phone and announce I've located a "Christmas: Less Religious" playlist. My daughter shouts from across the house, without a hint of irony, "Oh thank God!"

Christmas at our house, lol.

 

[Mendalla]

Is this unreligious enough? It's a cover of a 1970s Slade rocker that has long been one of my favourite rock Christmas songs. The band is German power metal band Blind Guardian who are usually a pretty serious band (lots of songs based on classic fantasy and mythology) but they stuck their collective tongue in their cheek here and had an absolutely blast with this one.

Lead singer Hansi Kursch is pretty obviously wearing a wig here. His hair hasn't been that long in decades. In fact, he normally looks like someone's accountant with very short, neatly coiffed hair.

 

[WhyCzar]

Karaoke anyone?

 

[Mendalla]

I am quite fond of "In The Bleak Mid-Winter", music by Gustav Holst setting words by poet Christina Rossetti. It's a soft, beautiful carol/hymn for the Christmas season. Here is a new arrangement for voices and guitar by tenor and arranger Blake Morgan of Voces8, who performs it with former Voces8 first soprano Andrea Haines. It is gorgeous.

 

[Mendalla]

New Year's Eve and Day kind of mark the end of the holiday period so I think "Auld Lang Syne" is fair game for this thread. But how about a twist: It's in Mandarin, the dominant Chinese language. Performer is American vocal a capella group Home Free and the video is shot in Yu Garden, a favourite spot of mine in Shanghai, China.