Christmas Gilt (Ella Fitzgerald / Johnny Smith / Grant Green / Others)

Abstract The annual profusion of Christmas albums suggests a bottomless appetite for the same dozen or 15 songs done in every conceivable fashion, and a hapless record industry eager to oblige. When in doubt, shake up the backlist, develop a seasonal pun, and leave the rest to nostalgia. It is often noted that most of the good American Christmas songs, beginning with Berlin’s “White Christmas” (1942, not so very long ago) are by Jewish composers. They have secularized the revelry to the point where even unlapsed Catholics must at times struggle to recall that all the fuss commemorates their Savior’s birth and not merely ASCAP and BMI annuities involving sleigh bells, drummer boys, chipmunks, reindeer, chestnuts, Santa, Frosty, and, most crucially, snow—of which there was a dearth in Galilee. Why those songwriters could not bestir themselves to write a decent Hanukkah song is a mystery for the ages. Hath not a Jew snow, snowmen, bells, singing animals, Buddy Rich? Secularist that I am, I don’t need chain-rattling Marley to muster my belief in miracles, for example, the sound of Ella Fitzgerald’s voice in 1960, when she recorded Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas, recently reissued by Verve. Her instrument was pearly—perhaps at its apogee— and her time, well, what is there left to say of her time, a musical Greenwich Mean? “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is near perfect, so near that for the duration of her vocal I am inclined to close the book on singers and concede that paradise is lost.