Cookin’ Soul – Doom Xmas
I’m always fascinated by the ways in which my generation manage to participate in the circulation of music. Amateur TikTok edits resurrect forgotten gems and turn obscure starlets into sensations; home producers fabricate entire albums if their favourite rapper doesn’t release enough. Such is the case with Doom Xmas, the brainchild of Grammy-winning Spanish producer Cookin’ Soul, which refashions the work of late cult rapper MF Doom into Christmas music. There are filthy Grinch soundtrack flips, hectic Latin Christmas skits and a chopped-and-screwed Nat King Cole that’ll change the way you hear The Christmas Song.
It’s an internet cult classic. Every Christmas, a carolling cohort of underground rap fans make their way to the comment sections to write something like: “They playin’ Mariah already, I’m blastin’ Doom!” And although it’s bootlegged, the tape has a strangely festive air: it’s a hit of humanity in the wake of an AI music slopticon, and a reminder that community clings on, especially at Christmas. Archie Forde
MF Doom: MF Grinch (Doom Xmas) – video
Mariah Carey
The one constant in all my core Christmas memories is Mariah Carey. The earliest is from when we were stuck in traffic, and I was too tiny to see anything through the car windows except kaleidoscopic lights above. Through the radio, Carey is belting out Santa Claus Is Coming to Town – far more exciting than my nursery’s version of Away in a Manger. Years later, I’m back in a car – this time with a friend who’s just passed his driving test. We spend lunchtime cruising around the residential streets near our sixth form, windows down, blasting All I Want for Christmas Is You. That evening, his mum receives an email from school warning that her son “should stop trying to impress girls”. (He’s gay.) And then there’s decorating the Christmas tree with my now-husband for the first time. Carey’s hip-hop-ified version Here Comes Santa Claus was playing; he teased me for only listening to “funky” Christmas songs. What did he expect, the Pogues? It’s been my go-to ever since. Olive Pometsey
Various artists – Chante, C’est Noël
Various artists: Chante, C’est Noël – video
In 2003, I was 14, my middle brother 12 and my youngest five. That Christmas, we took the latter’s first trip to Disneyland Paris. I remember it being so freezing that returning home with fewer toes seemed like a genuine possibility, the Indiana Jones rollercoaster being so dead that my middle brother and I went on it twice in a row – and this infernal song.
There is a daily parade in the park, and from early November, it is Christmas-themed. That year, its soundtrack was the aggressively rousing, major-chord nightmare that is Chante, C’est Noël, which I now recognise to be a sort of schlager-adjacent choral toothache. It became a running joke how much my brothers and I hated the song, one my dad capitalised on by secretly buying the CD and repeatedly, gleefully blasting it on the long drive home as well as many subsequent car trips, despite our shrieks of objection. To this day, the intro’s jingling bells and rhapsodic cry of “CHANTE!” can still make us significantly bigger kids recoil in horror. Laura Snapes
El Vez – Feliz Navidad
Thanks to its prominent placement in numerous Christmas playlists on streaming services, José Feliciano’s Feliz Navidad has become a festive staple in the UK, despite the nation’s general resistance to foreign-language music: it reached the Top 20 here for the first time last year. But growing up in the Midlands in the 90s, the closest to Latin culture we got was gawping at a sizzling platter of restaurant fajitas, and so I didn’t hear Feliz Navidad until a cover version was included on a 2000 Christmas compilation by indie radio station XFM. It’s by El Vez, a Latino Elvis impersonator who sings the “I wanna wish you a merry Christmas” chorus like a man rushing around to individual audience members, grabbing their lapels and leaving them beaded with his own sweat. When I eventually heard Feliciano’s version, it couldn’t help but feel rather stiff and polite in comparison, so I always reach for El Vez’s instead, to charge me up with the giddiness of a child ripping into what Santa has left them. Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody
Striking … Queen in the video for Bohemian Rhapsody. Photograph: David Levene/Guardian Video
We don’t really think of Bohemian Rhapsody as a Christmas song, although it was the Christmas No 1 twice, in 1975 and after Freddie Mercury’s death in 1991. The first time around, I would have been four years old, so it’s testament to how striking Bohemian Rhapsody sounds that I still remember it, albeit entirely jumbled up in my head with the way the Christmas tree in the hall of our house looked at night: a proper 1970s tree – proudly artificial, with silver tinsel branches – with its blue and red lights reflecting in the glass front door and in the baubles, which were mirrored like disco balls. I distinctly recall sitting on the stairs after Top of the Pops had finished, my head still full of Bohemian Rhapsody, staring at the tree, lost in the sparkly wonder of it all, the theme music from The Good Life – which must have been on afterwards – coming from the living room. It felt magical: the way Christmas is meant to feel, but hardly ever does. Alexis Petridis
Lena Horne – Jingle All the Way
The yuletide soundtrack in our house comes with a huge dollop of cheese – lounge, light jazz, the edgier end of easy listening; laid-back holiday heroes such as Dean Martin, Count Basie, Julie London, Jimmy McGriff, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, Elvis, Peggy Lee, Lou Rawls and Nat King Cole, easing through various arrangements of the same dozen or so songs. It’s like welcoming old friends back. You won’t get any more Christmas spirited than Lena Horne’s Jingle All the Way, a lively take on Jingle Bells with orchestration best described as “big band in dub”. Try to stand still. Or for the regretfully over-refreshed, there’s always Miles Davis’s superbly cynical Blue Christmas (To Whom It May Concern). Sample lyric: “Sidewalk Santy Clauses are much, much, much too thin …” For years now 1960s lounge songs have covered our festive spectrum and understood Christmas in a way only a dry martini can hope to. Lloyd Bradley
Christina Rossetti/Gustav Holst – In the Bleak Midwinter
A wintry scene. Photograph: Andrew Roland/Alamy
In the 1950s, Christmas with my mum in the rambling old house in which the two of us rattled around meant fireside warmth, mother’s jokes and fears and badly wrapped but cherished presents. We shared superstitious, God-devoid minds, but the beautiful Rossetti/Holst carol In the Bleak Midwinter mesmerised me, for its snowbound atmospherics and the narrator’s childlike desire to please awesome forces. I’ve sometimes played it on guitar at neighbours’ seasonal gatherings, usually with the intro – for a cheap laugh, not a personal revelation – “It doesn’t come much bleaker than my version”. My guitar guru, the great Wes Montgomery, was also my life-changing wormhole into the musical multiverse of jazz – his 1966 Christmas cover of Baby, It’s Cold Outside with Hammond maestro Jimmy Smith is cheesy but for a fan, it doesn’t date. John Fordham
