Christmas In July

.....Sorry for the delay. I discovered in February that while I owned copies of all of Motown's Christmas pop music, there were in fact some subsidiary titles (now long out of print) of which I was unaware, including some instrumental jazz and a ventriloquist's album. (I know, I know: how can you tell if he's moving his lips on a record?) It looks like the delay will extend the blog's life into next year anyway, so I'll complete the Motown listings next February. Tomorrow, when it's not so late, I'll give a full entry. At the moment I want to explain something about the criteria for selections. I touched on this somewhat in the second post, "Label Glossary", but I've avoided making hard and fast rules about what I'll discuss because, after all, this is a hobby done for fun. One objective is to maximize verifiable information, citing sources when necessary. Another is to keep an open mind and include the widest variety of original twentieth century music related to Christmas. What gets excluded? Usually covers, for the sake of brevity. Anything else? Well, when I finally dragged myself back to this poor neglected blog the Elton John song "COLD AS CHRISTMAS" occurred to me. The chorus has the line "It's July, but it's cold as Christmas in the middle of the year." It's the lead track on his 1983 MTV-era comeback album, LP TOO LOW FOR ZERO, so even though I don't remember it being a 7" single (was it?) I've heard it enough that it keeps cropping up in my memory when I try to recall pop songs about Christmas. Of course, one huge advantage that my memory has over an online term search is that I know that the song takes place in July and it's about a divorce or break up. It's a simile, not a Christmas song. A decent song, but this blog isn't the right place for it. So, while I hadn't seen it as necessary to mention before, I may as well go on record that the songs here need to be about the holiday or season in some sense. And I hope to see more of them soon.