It's the holiday season, which means Christmas music. Lots and lots or Christmas music, most of which was written before the people listening to it were even alive. While "Jingle Bells" and "We Three Kings" are great, and resilient, we're devoting this year to finding the best Christmas song written since 1989. We continue today with #10, and an ode to Christmas on the road from Low.
#10: Low, "Just Like Christmas" (1999)
This Friday is predicted to be the busiest airline travel day of the 2014 holiday season, the peak of a 17-day period in which more than 45 million people will crisscross the skies over America, looking for (or getting away from) home. The urge to return to our origins hits strongest during the winter, whether the journey takes us to a physical place or a group of people or the signifiers of our youth. It's a subject covered by many classics carols ("Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" and the tearjerkingly on-the-nose "I'll Be Home For Christmas" chief among them), and it seems to be on the mind of Low's Mimi Parker as she rambles through the Scandanavian countryside.
Although it's got all of the snow and sleigh bells needed to make our top ten (and score a plum spot on 2004's The O.C. Mix 3: Have A Very Merry Chrismukkah), the action of "Just Like Christmas" doesn't necessarily take place during the holidays. Rather, the song speaks to the power of human interactions, especially those entered into when you're cold and lost and far from home, to conjure the same kind of warmth usually reserved for the December 25s of our bubble-light-illuminated memories. It wraps its all-weather sentiment in some shiny holiday trimmings, waiting to be opened whenever it's needed most. If you wind up delayed in an airport during the next three weeks, you know where to find it.