Merry Christmas everybody!

Thought I might share some great holiday videos from the online repository that is YouTube.

The first video has one of the oddest collaborations in music history: legendary crooner Bing Crosby and glam rocker David Bowie performing a duet of "Little Drummer Boy/Peace On Earth" in Crosby's Christmas special. Crosby had died a month before it aired, but a month before his passing, he recorded this duet which has now become a holiday staple.



The second video is Darlene Love performing "Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)" in Late Show with David Letterman (a show tradition for more than a decade now). The song is included in the classic holiday album A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector, which despite accolades from Rolling Stone (which named it as one of the 500 greatest albums of all time) to The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, was actually a failure in its initial release due to the fact that its release date (Nov. 22, 1963) was also the very same date JFK was assassinated, thus many radio stations at that time did not play any of the songs due to the period of mourning. Also, the Ronettes (the group who sang the Spector hit "Be My Baby") were the original choice to record the song, before it went to Love after the lead singer of the Ronettes was not able to put much emotion into the song. The song almost remained in popular obscurity until U2 did a cover version (which is also the third video) during their concert tour in 1987.





The next two videos are by two ex-Beatles: Paul McCartney's synthesizer-heavy "Wonderful Christmastime" and John Lennon's anti-war "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)".





Count on Weird Al Yankovic to use the apocalypse as fodder for an entertaining holiday song. "Christmas At Ground Zero" is a song that only Dr. Strangelove would be proud of.



One of the best Filipino Christmas songs is "Fruitcake" by the band The Eraserheads. I did a short music video last year using the song, which I plan to put up on YouTube in the future. But for the moment, we will just settle for this low quality video:



The last video is The Beach Boys in its heyday performing "Little Saint Nick". Unfortunately, the person who uploaded the video disabled the embedding function so you will have to view it here instead.