This Year’s Christmas Song…

A few days out from the 25th, here’s this year’s Christmas song: Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time Is Here.” Guaraldi’s pop breakthrough was the piano theme, “Cast Your Fate to the Wind”, which was a big hit in 1962. ”Christmas Time” was written for the 1965 television special A Charlie Brown Christmas, featuring characters from Charles Schulz’s beloved “Peanuts” cartoon strip, and has since become a seasonal jazz standard. Originally an instrumental, producer Lee Mendelson decided that the song needed lyrics. “When we looked at the show about a month before it was to go on the air, I said, ‘That’s such a pretty melody — we should try and find someone to put lyrics to it.’” When he was unable to, he wrote the lyrics himself: “I sat down with an envelope at our kitchen table and wrote it in about ten minutes. It was a poem that just came to me. It was only about a minute long. And Vince got a bunch of little kids together (the children’s choir at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in San Rafael, California) to sing it.” So here’s my take on Vince and Lee’s melancholy and wistful Christmas classic.

Previous Christmas songs can be found at martincolyer.com