Tim Minchin’s Christmas song White Wine in the Sun is now pretty well known in Australia I think – or at least no longer obscure enough to seem novel when posted on a website like this. But I want to post it anyway, and I figure it will be new at least to any overseas readers who haven’t been chased away by my articles about Victorian urban planning. What I like so much about it is that it so completely and comprehensively rejects two of the cores of traditional Christmas iconography – the religious underpinnings and the northern hemisphere winter imagery – but gets instead to the core of what Christmas is (or should be) all about.
While I’m posting Christmas clips from YouTube: another favourite of mine is this duet by David Bowie and Bing Crosby, recorded for television in 1977. It’s such a strange juxtaposition of talent, and very corny, and yet it works. There’s something about Bing Crosby’s voice, in particular, that evokes Christmas in a very profound Pavlovian way for me.
And finally – if I’m uploading Christmas-themed YouTube clips I have to touch on the Star Wars Holiday Special. The internet has kind of taken the fun out of this: the appeal of the special was once its unobtainability and half-remembered status. Kids in the early eighties would swear they’d seen this thing, but nobody would believe them, and over time it became a legend. Now that it’s readily obtained again – it’s on YouTube in its entirety here – it’s just one more in a long line of terrible Star Wars spin-offs (albeit the first and worst). But taken a few seconds at a time, it retains some of its original “I can’t believe they actually did this” power. So, for example, there’s Harrison Ford’s touching reunion with Chewbacca’s family.
Merry Christmas!