ULTIMATE XMAS MEGAMIX 2X2X REDUX

No matter how many different ways this playlist ends up formatted on my phone, these Sailor Moon songs always seem to be at the start. It seemed right to preserve that. These were in the original 2016 mix. I found them in a deep dive into a Sailor Moon forum, and downloaded them there too! They don't make forums like they used to, I tell you what.

This is a very special song, and I good way to really begin. I've ended up with the most versions of this song, and the variety is a good taste of what this playlist is like. This is the original, by Ryuichi Sakamoto (member of the hugely popular 80's electronic J-pop band that my mom was a big fan of) for a film he starred in with David Bowie (who my mom was OBSESSED with. I inherited a lot of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence paraphernalia.) I'm sure I heard this song when I was a kid and had no idea what it was!

Despite my mom's fanatacism, this was actually the first version of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence I heard where I knew what it was! I was a huge fan of Anamanaguchi in high school, so this one goes way back. Somewhere somehow they dropped this little remix online, and I downloaded it. I even put it on the only mixtape I ever made for a girl I liked! She didn't like it that much! In fact: I think this is my least favorite version now!

Now this one is incredible. David Sylvian was a contemporary of Sakamoto's. This was their second collaboration and did a lot to break him out of a big creative rut (check out the wikipedia article!) So beautiful and moving and gay. God bless. The music video is a wonder as well.

Wow, another gem! Utada Hikaru of course is famous to me specifically for her intros to the Kingdom Hearts games (and recently came out at a they/them). This interpretation is exactly that kind of unhinged that I can see a teenage girl obsessively belting out in her room. "mp3 mp3 players, work it out work it out husters, Om Mani Padme Hum, Hum"

I've tried quite a few times to get into Slime Girls and I haven't, but dang if I didn't include this solid remix.

This is one of the mysterious soundcloud deep dives I went on in 2020. I can't find any longstanding or substantiative information on this artist beyond their soundcloud, but wow what a great plucky string cover!! Gotta be in the playlist.

Ok, this is my proudest inclusion. THIS is a christmas ep by Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek (of Big Thief fame) from wayyy back in 2012, 4 years before Big Thief's first album and 2 years before Adrianne's Hours Were the Birds. Three covers, two original songs, all deeply beautiful and comforting. I implore you to listen to this.

Of course, there are Animal Crossing songs in this playlist. There isn't too much to say here, it kind of speaks for itself. Winter 2020 did have a very depressing Animal Crossing new years, but that's not exactly relevant... The final song is in a rare category in that I cannot find it online again no matter how much I look! I was expecting that to be a bigger problem assembling this page, but only one other one couldn't be found. “Christmas Eve - Kill me Crossing" was a YTPMV (a genre of youtube video that makes a cover of a song out of snippets of other media, with an accompanying video.) This one took the anime Lucky Star as it's source material to cover the original Animal Crossing's Christmas Eve track. It's good!

Whew, these are beautiful songs with a beautiful story. Masatoshi Hamada is a member of the Japanese comedy duo Downtown with Hitoshi Matsumoto (who wrote the lyrics). They met in middle school and have been a duo since 1982. The song depicts their very real conditions of growing up poor and cherishing Chicken Rice as the height of indulgence, refusing anything else. Now, (according to their wiki page) "they are one of the most influential and prolific comedy duos in Japan today"! I think I found this song browsing the reddit for their popular variety show Downtown no Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahende!! The variety show has them with three other comedians in, for example, an airport that's been taken over by the studio and filled with pranks for the five comedians to endure for 24 hours. If any of them laugh, people run out with clubs and smack them really hard on the butt. Insane.

If asked, I will tell you Sleigh Ride is my favorite christmas song. Despite that, it only appears thrice in my playlist. And I think that's because it's a hard song to do right for me. I'd consider the John Williams version to be my ideal. It's so lively and warm, and you can hear the horses! Usually covers don't adequately capture these very important things. Both of these versions have been in my life a long time. I remember walking to the bus in the snow in early high school listening to Fearofdark's version on my PSP (the way I listened to music before I got an mp3 player.) I still love this chiptune rendition so much, it has such breadth and excitement!

Speaking of deep cuts, this song hurts. This is one of a few songs that I usually skip when I'm listening with other people. I remember when this came out in 2013 and listening to it while I trudged to my first winter of college classes. I cried a lot to this song, which in retrospect feels a little vampiric. This was before I knew Cats Millionaire as Devi McCallion, before she was Girls Rituals or Black Dresses. I think this was the last Cats Millionaire song ever released actually.

Another Devi McCallion xmas banger!! This was actually a collaboration with Ada Rook, before the two of them would become Black Dresses. They were thinking about putting it on their debut album WASTEISOLATION. What a different world we would live in if they had.

Now this was THE iconic unlistenable track on the original 2016 mix. It is mastered so much louder than every other song on here and I was so scared at the end of every quiet song that this would be next. It's funny looking back at this, because I think I must've seen them post it on twitter, back when I had a different kind of twitter presence, then I downloaded it? It's just that the way I existed in the internet ecosystem was so different back then, it's strange to reflect on.

Ok this one came out just in time to make the list in 2020 and I'm so glad it did. It slaps!!! Olivia and I were chanting this to each other off and on all winter. Yes this is electonic ska but the prevailing industry promoted genre term is hyperpop and i will use that term for convenience lol. Hyperpop makes a lot of sense for xmas music! I remember I was able to find so much vaporwave xmas music for the 2016 mix (that I ultimately removed) and based on how much DNA hyperpop pulls from vaporwave I'm just WAITING for more xmas stuff to happen. maybe 2021 is the year, fingers crossed.

So yes, what I say above holds, and against all odds here is hyperpop icon GFOTY dropping an iconic xmas track way back in 2014! Back when PC Music was alone in this weird world they called “electropop". It's unhinged and I love it. And it is one of those great xmas songs that is totally unique and original while still maintaining a strong xmas vibe.

bulldog eyes comes out of the blue with this perfect santa baby cover. It's not on bandcamp anymore unfortunately, but you can still find it on youtube for the time being.

Wow, uhh, this is a very emotional one for me. SoGreatandPowerful changed my life, i'll just leave it at that. I love this song. It communicates a small-time christmas spirit, sparkling snow after dark, friends gathered outside despite the cold. I've never heard anything else like it. If you are in the chaotic embedded version of the page then you'll see I went ahead and plopped the tumblr post in place of a video or anything to really capture that special feeling. This is a collaboration with pasteur and is based on a my little pony: friendship is magic fanfiction called "Past Sins", where princess luna is, uhh, reincarnated as a filly in the everfree forest and Twilight finds her and nurses her back to health? (Ok I looked it up to check how close I was and wow this thing was over 200,000 words and very complicated.) I did read the whole fanfiction because of this song. Another note: the subreddit dedicated to SGaP was doing this thing for a while where the community picked a song and everyone who wanted to could upload themselves singing along, and someone would edit it all into a choral kind of situation. I participated for this one and somewhere out there is that video, with little ol' me buried under like 25 other voices.

I put these in the 2016 version because I wanted to show I had range and still liked some of the classics too. Kind of silly in retrospect, but they have stuck around because they are classics!

Another 2016 find, I thought it was funny at the time that Coldplay had a christmas song. I had a strong and short coldplay phase in middle school, and I think this is a pretty beautiful rendition. 2016 was also the first year that Olivia and I knew each other. She was out of town for the holidays and I made a video of me singing this song and playing the piano really badly as a christmas present. Really sweet...

Yes, this is a Kate Bush song. I always forget this is in the playlist, but here it is! Did you know Kate Bush did a christmas special in 1979? Did you know this is the only christmas song she performs over the whole thing? Here's an article about it.

The 1995 Little Women is one of our household's most cherished christmas films. This is one of its most cherished songs for us. I hope you take a pause and a breath and enjoy it.

This was the result of a dive so deep that I have no idea how I found this song, but I'm glad I did! Such perfect high energy Japanese christmas action! There were a lot of long frantic nights dedicated to working on this playlist in 2020, and this is one of the fruits of that labor.

Thank god for Sidney Gish, and thank goodness she made this song. Nothing makes my ADHD addled brain feel quite like Sidney Gish, and to have it at the holidays is just what I need. This is the Michael Buble version of Santa Baby, which is widely known as the “No Homo" version because of how he changed the lyrics so it wouldn't sound gay when he sung about wanting to make out with santa. And yet, it somehow finds a way to sound more gay because of the changes.

These are also in the YTPMV genre (like Kill me Crossing above). It takes snippets of an internet famous white pomeranian named Gabe. These two videos got wildly popular, but tragically the dog died shortly after they came out. What a tragedy. These ended up being the most well known songs of my 2016 mix. For one of my coworkers, fast repetitive music that didn't resolve would trigger her anxiety, and so she absolutely hated these two songs. Of course, I would play my playlist at work every holiday season, and it ended up with a reputation. By the time 2020 came around and I came in excited to unveil my work, I had people responding, “oh is that the one with those dogs songs in it I've heard about?"

I actually hadn't heard this song until like 2019 and wow what a sleeper! I think a lot of people hate this song because of how kitschy and repetitive it is, but that synth does something to me that I cannot describe and absolutely love.

Did you know Mac Demarco has been releasing a christmas cover for every year for like 5 or 6 years? These are the one's that I think aren't really bad!

This is a song I never would've heard about if not for Olivia. It's something of an in-joke between her and her sibling, and I've been brought into the fold. It's the perfect singer-songwriter-narrative-driven track that we all need this season. Technically it is a New Year's song, but who cares. The Nightcore version is my desperate attempt to find literally any other version of this song that was any good, but I couldn't! I think the Nightcore, though uninspired, is quite funny.

This. EP. Is. So. Good. I cannot recommend it enough. Perfectly comforting, loose and so well constructed, it invites you in. I feel like this is already a longstanding part of my xmas tradition.

Putting together the redux in 2020, I stepped back and realized there was a vital part of my personality missing from the mix: soothing ambient music! My mind went straight to that inside-a-tavern-on-a-cold-winter-day aura that Elder Scrolls games have such a way of twirling into being.

Last Christmas is increasingly a classic. 90's nostalgia is on the rise, and nothing rings that bell louder than Wham! First: please watch the original music video, it's even better than the song. The second is by the man who lives inside your computer brain even if you don't know it: Neil Cicieriga, with the thing our addled age needs most: a mashup of last christmas and smash mouth. There was a fun little game in the 2016 mix where there was only this version and the original, and you never knew when the song started which one it would be! The rest of the versions are just, really good, but I haven't got more to say about it! Except the last one, which is the other track that I simply cannot find online again. A mystery!

God, I loved George & Jonathan. They did chiptune music in the music making program that came included with the download of the classic indie game Cave Story, pxtone. I listened to these songs year round (lol, as if that isn't true for this whole playlist). The last tracks are actually secret bonus tracks. All of their albums released with a companion website, Here's the link to The Best Christmas. If you listen through the whole album on the site 3 times (I think), then the first track will transform into the Peter Michael Berkman edit, which has lyrics and totally rules. I'm sure it's up on youtube too, but where's the fun in that.

Nothing says mid-2010's tumblr gay like Hawaii: Part II. I actually found this from pasteur's tumblr (the same person from A Nyxmas Carol above) back in 2013 I think. They were posting weird and obscure christmas songs and one of them was Introduction to the Snow. I was enraptured. I could not stop singing these two songs, they were like liquid gold to me. Since then it seems like the album has gotten wicked popular, which is wild to me.

Hey, y'ever heard of a little thing called Homestuck? I'm not going to explain it here, but would it surprise you if I said I was that kind of person in high school, that it shaped my brain in ways I'm still coming to terms with? And did you know Homestuck had such a vivacious music community that they had to start a second bandcamp page for unofficial music that people were making? This was the first album to come out of that page. These are nice songs. Carefree Perigee is by Toby Fox, who made Undertale (which appears below). Not included here, because it sucks, is Shit, Let's be Santa, a song that plays out a joke in Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. It has a nice and funny chorus.

This is a mystery group I found via a random link from scout to a song on spotify. I looked it up on bandcamp and found all these great albums, including this one! But only one other person has ever bought it? G. Weller, who made one of my favorite albums of 2021, Pirate Songs of the Lower Islands, plays guitar. Please enjoy this album.

Look, it's Full Color Sound again! These two songs are incredible. The second one is a strikingly unique original that is just so funky and well done! Please!!

Undertale is widely regarded as having “great music", and these snowy tracks are no exception. No story, just good!

Oh, who is that at the top? The final in the Devi McCallion Holiday Trilogy? A beautiful and haunting rendition of Justin Bieber's surprisingly heartfelt xmas track. (Devi recently uploaded this to Spotify but since you can't have original parts of a track in a cover it doesn't have the bieber background and sounds very different). This also brings us to Christmasasaurus, a towering column of perfect absurd beauty. These three songs are from Vol. 8.

Here we have my two favorites from Vol. 7, both sparkly crystaline pleasures. And, fun fact, this was also where the Girls Rituals All I Want for Christmas is You track ended up getting released! Yes, there are 6 (plus an extra!) more volumes of Christmasasaurus before these and there are wonderful treasures still left to plunder.

And here, with resounding fury is the final piece of our playlist journey. This album is crammed full with songs that are somehow exactly what I've wanted since I started this playlist. The Sleigh Ride rendition (sr), is sharp and lively. Andy's Wonderful Christmastime manages to be very funny and also so beautifully arranged, it's a joy to listen to. Jungle Bells gains such intensity that the whole thing flies apart. Mary Did U Kno? is a ridiculous song that is so frustrating because I really don't like it but it's so good that I can't get it out of my head!! Floor Baba takes us on that smooth hot cocoa comedown only for crisis sigil (Ada Rook) to spike us back up into a wall of sound. Driving Home With a Peavey is a sparkling and fast version of Chris Rea's Driving Home For Christmas (which in retrospect should've been in this playlist...). It's charming, it's friendly, it fills my heart with warmth. And for a double all-the-way-round wrap-up: This is where Cats Millionaire's Wish List finally was properly released AND we end on a great version of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence.