Frasers in Glasgow - truly eyewatering when you go in but no question it’s festive!

Frasers in Glasgow - truly eyewatering when you go in but no question it’s festive!

After touching on some of the deeper stuff the last couple of days, today I’m going back to the music. Not the harp stuff this time, but the enduring pop classics that show up every year.

If you like Christmas, you’ll have a favourite (or at least a top three in my case). If you hate Christmas you’ll have a most hated. If you work in retail or the hospitality industry, our thoughts are with you.

I’m in quite a newly formed team at work and one of our spontaneous ice breaker questions while we waited for our boss to arrive at our team meeting last week was, “What’s your favourite Christmas song?”

Heated discussion followed, but across ten people, two clear favourites emerged. Neither of them were mine, but I loved the passionate exchange of views and it was another reminder for me that music matters. Even the fluffiest of pop tunes bookmark people’s lives, and I can’t imagine what it’s like to have written a song that is known and loved by millions of people across the world.

So without further ado, here are my favourites.


A Christmas Gift for You was my favourite non-harpy Christmas album until recently (A Very Special Christmas took over this year) and this is my favourite of favourite Christmas pop songs.

Apart from We Belong Together, I am not a fan of Mariah Carey really. But this one…. well it really is Christmas on a stick. Bonus points for a big dog in the video! :-)

I’m a child of the 80s and this is the first Christmas song I really remember. I think I was still a bit young for Kim Wilde at that point but watching it back now, I adore her hair, and oh my goodness that dress! Other versions are available of course, but this is the one for me and it sits at equal 2nd in my Top 3 along with Mariah.

I was too busy listening to the Doors and Aphex Twin through my teens, and the Spice Girls kind of passed me by until the year I left school. At the time I couldn’t understand why even the cool alternative grunge girls loved them, and I was going through some pretty awkward teenage times re. how I looked and they really didn’t help - I got that they were all different, but for me they were all too pretty pretty.

But, now they are one of the things that reminds me of some of the better times at school. This one is the only Christmas single I’ve ever spent money on in the hope of getting it to Christmas no.1 - I bought it in HMV Market Street in Manchester on the day it was released. It was my first year of uni and I think I was missing my friends.

Lastly, it’s not remotely fluffy pop AT ALL, but this song, this version, is the one that out of all the Christmas music on the planet, I can’t do Christmas without.

The strings at the start, his wonderfully smooth voice, that beautiful smile, the joy, the clarity of his words and the guitar intervals at the end. Just perfection.

Lastly, a reminder that at 9pm on Christmas Eve I’ll be livestreaming a short cosy Christmas concert via Facebook.

The link to all the information is here - I hope to ‘see’ you there!

FB Christmas Thing event cover.png

Share