Our next guest contributor

Happy Holidays! I'm sure you are just starting to run around doing your holiday shopping. It's our second guest programmer this year and it has nothing to due with the fact that it's Julietta's birthday. (And I didn't have to harangue her for several days to get her actual choices.)

Here are her holiday choices:

Christmas Is All Around   Billy Mack -



Love is All Around was a hit by The Troggs in 1967. In 2003, the song was redone for the movie Love Actually as Christmas is All Around. In the film, the song was a holiday cash grab by aging rock star Billie Mack, reworking his hit version from decades past. The result was a wonderful send up of music videos, holiday songs, and rock stars who have hung around one holiday season too many.


This Christmas  Donny Hathaway -



Like many Christmas songs, this one took a while to find an audience. Released as a single in 1970, it went nowhere, but later became a modern holiday standard, covered by a wide range of artists including Destiny's Child, Aretha Franklin and Lady Antebellum.


Christmas Tree Farm   Taylor Swift -



Taylor Swift grew up on a Christmas tree farm that was run by her parents at their Pine Ridge Farm home in Reading, Pennsylvania. Taylor Swift's childhood job on the Christmas tree farm was "picking the praying mantis pods off of the trees so the bugs wouldn't hatch inside people's houses." 

Nice work if you can get it.


White Christmas   The Drifters -



A perennial seller for an entire generation, the song is by far the biggest-selling Christmas song of all time, and most likely the biggest-selling single of all time. Sales figures from the 1940s and 1950s are rough estimates, especially the worldwide numbers, so there's no way to know for sure, but Guinness World Records estimates White Christmas at #1 with 50 million sold.

Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)  Mariah Carey -



Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) is a song originally recorded by Darlene Love in 1963 that Mariah covered for her 1994 Merry Christmas album. “I really did enjoy Mariah Carey's version, I think she stuck so close to me,” Darlene told Variety in 2020. “I was really surprised, because that has a lower voice than how she sings. But when you have a song that has a great melody, like ‘Christmas, Baby’ does, there's no sense in trying to mess with it. And she has such a great, powerful voice. She did an unbelievable version.”


Julietta would like to wish everyone a Happy and Healthy holiday season and a bright New Year.


As always - for an extra added treat, here's a few Christmas songs from Puddles Pity Party



What would Christmas be without our favorite 7 foot tall clown singing Christmas songs -

Demand Euphoria!