Member-only story
Featured
Why Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” Is Awesome
Celebrate a song the haters have been getting wrong for 45 years
I live in the kind of neighborhood where the most popular local business is a giant two-story indie bookstore. Last December, I was in there buying books and notebooks and colored pencils and other gifts for my wife and the few other people I shop for. (And myself. I mean, I’m in a bookstore, I’m gonna buy books.)
I hadn’t been paying attention to the holiday music they were playing as I shopped, because it was the same things every other store plays from the day after Thanksgiving on. Let’s assume it was Mariah. When that faded out, a vintage synthesizer pinged out single notes that landed like raindrops until they coalesced into a sprightly little melody underpinned by sleigh bells. And then one of my favorite voices in the history of pop music cheerfully sang “The mood is right…”
And then the song stopped dead. Like, there should have been the sound of a needle being ripped across the vinyl. And three long seconds later, Stevie Wonder’s 1967 single “What Christmas Means To Me” started playing. “Well, thank god for that,” someone muttered a few feet away from me in the Art, Design, and Photography section. For a brief moment, I wanted to show him the true meaning of Christmas via a dope…