Humbug Boogie
I collect offbeat Christmas music. Alt.Xmas is my term for the stuff that’s not commercial, pious, or overplayed. Not just new music, or music from my childhood, but the whole history of recorded Christmas music.
Especially old music: 30s swing, 50s R&B, 70s top 40. I also love genre-defying one-off 45s that some kid played in his room while the family was downstairs watching the game. My tastes are way eclectic: Christmas music can be a great entry point to bluegrass, gospel, classic blues, dancehall.
Because the audience for Alt.Xmas is so small special, and fans of its entire history a minuscule fraction of that, my annual Christmas mix became something of a White Elephant. In the streaming age, better to provide a resource for the intrepid and let you make your own mix.
A few years ago, I sorted my collection into eras: 90s alternative, 70s-80s, early 60s, postwar, swing. It's a big old mess, but this omnibus mix, Humbug Boogie, has 500 songs from fifty-plus years of collecting music across all #theErasofAlt.Xmas. (Hit that tag to get the full overview of my subjective, ever-changing history of a full century of Christmas Music I Like.)
Youtube Music isn't exactly curator-friendly, but has more deep cuts. Hit shuffle, then like and skip to make your own Alt.Xmas playlist.
A history of alt.Xmas
I duplicated it on Spotify but it's much shorter because Spotify.
