Darlene Love - "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)"
RUN DMC - "Christmas In Hollis"
The Pogues feat. Kirsty MacColl - "Fairytale of New York"

The stereo broke at work. The place is all decked out with lit-up Christmas trees, wreaths, plastic boughs of holly, but there is no aural equivalent to all this visual mirth. This is a problem for me, because it's December and I actually like Christmas songs. Scratch that, I love them. I know the cool thing is to sneer at the fakery of it all, the pure show business of these cherished chestnuts. I often imagine the session musicians crowded together in air-conditioned rooms at the height of summer, banging out these arrangements. I used to hate Christmas songs too, but a few years ago something switched in my brain, like when you stare at an optical illusion long enough that you see it both ways.

It's amazing - a genre of music that you only listen to for one month of the year until you're sick of it and then it's gone until next year. Imagine if every month had its own catalogue of songs. It's a weird gamble for any song-writer, polishing something up, knowing that the song will only be played for one month out of the year, but hoping that it will be played for one month out of the year - forever.

So here are a few of my favourites, none of them deep cuts. Darlene Love's longing voice sets "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" on fire. This song is a pocket opera. Almost thirty years later, RUN DMC's "Christmas in Hollis" might still be the only hip hop track to feature the words "yule log," and the sampled horns from Clarence Carter's "Back Door Santa" give it a real strut. Finally, "Fairytale of New York" captures the true sadness at the heart of Christmas. Listening to the spiteful sparring of Shane McGowan and Kirsty MacColl has made me well up on the crowded Christmas Eve bus through the borderlands of Western Quebec and Eastern Ontario more than once.