YAMeme: favorite Christmas/Winter songs

[damont]

Found this in the journals of ecwoodburn and sskipstress -- list one's favorite Christmas songs. And most lists I've seen include a mix of specifically Christmas-themed songs and generically Winter-themed songs. And then there are the musical pieces that don't quite fit in either category -- songs that are implicitly about Christmas but don't mention it directly, and songs that are really about winter but mention Christmas, sometimes almost in passing, but always simply as a holiday and aren't about the story of the Nativity. So I have separate lists of each category.

Five Six favorite Christmas-themed pieces:
"Hodie Christus Natus Est" by Jakob Handl
"O Magnum Mysterium" by Tomas Luis de Victoria (singing this on 20 Dec).
"What Child Is This" (both the usual carol and the Guaraldi arrangement)
"Hark, the Herald Angels Sing"
"Angelus ad Pastores Ait" by Samuel Scheidt
"Do You Hear What I Hear?" by Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne

Not exactly Christmas pieces, but kind of associated with it:
"Magnificat" by Antonio Vivaldi
"You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" by Albert Hague and Ted "Dr. Seuss" Geisel

Not exactly generic Winter pieces, but mostly so:
"Silver Bells" by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans
"The Christmas Song" by Mel Torme (esp. the Nat King Cole version)
"White Christmas" by Irving Berlin (esp. the Drifters version)
"Christmas Wrapping" by Chris Butler (ah, the Waitresses, freshman year, WCWM... here's an interesting retrospective about the song.)

Five six favorite generic winter themed pieces:
"Sleigh Ride" by Leroy Anderson (esp. his own recording thereof)
"Wassail Song" by Ralph Vaughan Williams
"Jingle Bells" (esp. the Booker T. and the MG's version)
"Song for a Winter's Night" by Gordon Lightfoot (here is a nice live version)
"Skating" by Vince Guaraldi (with his trio)
"Night" by George Winston (from the _December_ album)

Please feel free to chime in with your own list(s).

Comments

Re: After hearing the above from Samhain on,

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

To this I now must add the following line which only came out in 2010...

"Heard this same song twenty times,
And it's only Halloween!"

Sung to the tune of "Angels We Have Heard On High" as part of "The Christmas Can-Can" by Straight No Chaser.