Day 5 of the Underplayed Xmas Song Advent Calendar 2025. Artist: JD McPherson, song “Holly, Carol, Candy & Joy” from the album Socks. A child in bed dreams of a woman with a holly leaf dress, a candy cane woman, a bell woman, and a present personified as a woman, holding hands in a chain. A female director’s speech bubble, spoken through a bullhorn, points out that the lineup of cartoon women doesn’t match the title’s name ordering.
Today’s Advent Calendar square works off the single’s album cover. This is the 1st male artist on my underplayed Advent Calendar; yet it probably won’t throw you too much if you already guessed the theme for the 1st-quarter, 4 themes of 6 days each. Tomorrow will be the last day for this theme with the 1st Lady of American Song.
Another JD song from Socks will appear later on in Dec., my favorite. Holly… fit the obvious theme (keeping it easy for the first 6 like a Monday crossword). The number of unique concepts for Xmas songs with poetic-principled lyrics that track perfectly over JD’s rockabilly revival style songs, evokes rock and roll’s 1st mainstream era while also feeling contemporary. Like the greatest standards, JD’s songs seem timeless, like they should have always been in our lives. Rockabilly often jettisoned the storytelling side of country, yet JD tells a unique Xmas story with each track. After hearing so many failed attempts at writing Xmas songs, for maybe even the last 40 years—the 40s crooners always resurrecting each Xmas into the mainstream culture—you have to think many songwriters heard this new batch of songs and had to smack themselves—you mean these ideas were just there for the taking!?
I already knew JD & Socks but the great Terri Gross who studies songwriting feat. a rare live sesh on Fresh Air—and she’s Jewish (albeit many Jewish Xmas songwriters wrote standards so maybe it’s unsurprising).
https://www.npr.org/2018/12/11/675628082/a-roots-and-rockabilly-holiday-concert-with-jd-mcpherson-and-his-band
A JD McPherson tour poster for 2025. Check his website https://www.jdmcpherson.com/tour for tickets! He’s covering the map, hitting up as many cities as Santa! Tickets remain available, a Christmas miracle for you and a great cultural injustice for JD. This is not a paid promotion. This is fan promotion.
A beautiful Christmas colored splatter vinyl, red and green streaks on white. A kid in a leather jacket sulks, armed cross, on the floor, in the foreground of a Christmas tree, legs splayed on the floor, surrounded by socks with an unwrapped present box.
Day 5.
Holly, Carol, Candy and Joy.
by JD McPherson.
In 2018, a 41yo JD released Socks—the best-written originals Xmas album of this Century.
JD will tour the Socks set extensively this month (tickets still available)!
#music #musicsky #nowplaying #vinyl #JDMcpherson #TUCCAC #adventcalendar
![Even Beatle Paul, the ultimate insider, must feel like a bit of an outsider at Christmas (albeit that’s not this weeks’ theme). To say “Wonderful Christmastime” divides families at Xmas, wouldn’t be an understatement, or an overstatement, but a just-right statement. I once saw a bookseller involuntarily shout a short, distraught, “no!” as the dounce-dounce bounce of WC’s synth intro reverberated from the pre-programmed store holiday radio ceiling speakers; he dropped a stack of books with such a clatter, a manager came to see what was the matter. It was Paul. The Beatles became my favorite band in grade school, and despite introducing this advent calendar with a dig at Paul, I got to stan the most successful singer songwriter ever.
More on topic, here’s Rudolph the Red Nosed Reggae from the Paul McCartney The 7” Singles, (159 tracks with 80 singles). Wonderful Christmastime has 100s of millions of plays, and this Macca track on has 80,000 plays on Spotify, but it’s completely inoffensive and great background music for a holiday party, that allows Paul to have fun and play around with Reggae music, as he did when producing Linda’s “Sugartime” with lifelong friend Lee Scratch Perry; the McCartneys’ generous producing fee set up the Upsetter for his black arc studio years, and may have burned it down as an anti-racist statement inspired by his loyalty to Paul. That alone warms my heart, as I too am not a big fan of the production of his bigger Xmas song (albeit I included a bonus, version, that while not my favorite style, fits this simple lyric and shows what’s sort of catchy and beautiful about the song). Also heartwarming, the music video of Paul and Linda together, despite Paul’s nose being as red as Rudolph the Reggae Reindeer’s (that track just sounds like musical cocaine [allegedly])—and I need warming; it’s a snowy, cold winter. So today I’ll pretend I’m in Jamaica albeit it feels here more like a Dickensian winter.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:7kl2oibuldol4ubr3lyjjg5e/bafkreidgwo77i6cgtinoymqj7w5v5mkx5qfmaxfrxfqz2lor6glflm2taq)
![Day 7: the Underplayed Christmas Carol Advent Calendar 2025. Christmas at the Zoo by the Flaming Lips, Bonus: Reindeer in the Night by the Missile Toads. Three Giraffes, two zebras at a Christmas light watering hole, an elephant, a parrot, and a reindeer all glow in the night inside the entrance gate of Gotham Zoo, famously a hangout for Penguin during the Christmas motif heavy Tim Burton masterpiece Batman Returns. This depiction of Gotham Zoo.
The Flaming Lips gained fame in the alternative era, back in 1993 when “She Don’t Use Jelly” playing heavily on MTV could lift a band to the next-level. I’ve seen the Flaming Lips a few times and they put on a psychedelic rock theater show second to one, the Pink Floyd (& assc solo acts). Yet the Lips have a unique identity, iconography and a more alternative-art rock sensibility. As a fellow “guitar picker from Oklahoma City with a pair of blue jeans on,” (def poet Eddie Cochran), I can tell you there’s something surreal about Oklahoma—which may explain why great psychedelic bands come from there, the Lips and also the Starlight Mints.
Bonus: Reindeer in the Night by the Missile Toads, a self-described “jolly old” punk band that has 21 different Xmas songs like “Sock Full of Coal,” “If the Elves Were United,” and “Santa is a Nazis” available—get ready for a hit of nostalgia kush—on Bandcamp. Live Christmas Party renditions on YouTube also give a good measure of the band. The MTs write of their Xmas output: “every arrangement has the nip of a wintry night, the glitter of the tree, the warmth of the fireside with [its] gay red stockings dangling from the mantelpiece in anticipation of Santa’s visit.” 17 Nov 2013. They haven’t unseated the Vandals as the greatest Christmas punk outfit, but they’re sleighing in their shadow.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:7kl2oibuldol4ubr3lyjjg5e/bafkreifxwldbcbqwypipli27sccdkkbnlx72hvfqxquj2nivky7tmwy2jy)
