An Idiosyncratic Christmas Playlist

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Christmas has always made me nostalgic, but I have come to realize, with something of a jolt— perhaps because I just turned 65—that my sense of nostalgia is not what it used to be. When I was younger, I happily got all wistful when hearing Johnny Mathis or Perry Como because I would think of my parents and the Christmases I knew as a little kid. My folks were still around, and it didn’t seem all that long ago that I was hoping to find new accessories for my beloved Captain Action doll under the tree. When you’re very young, you’re enveloped in the memories and traditions of the adults around you. But my parents have been gone for many years, and the house I grew up in, where my mother would lovingly tape every Christmas card to the walls, has changed hands at least twice since their passing. So I now find myself comforted less by the songs of my childhood and more by the music I came to love as a teen and young adult—just like my parents did in the 1960s, when they were dreaming about the 1940s. I now want to remember my contemporaries, not those of my parents. Perhaps that’s how time and memory work; I still have fond recollections of my childhood, but I also have a kind of newer nostalgia. So yes, when I hear Vince Guaraldi , I still think of being bundled up in my pajamas with a mug of hot chocolate and A Charlie Brown Christmas . But if you look at my Spotify list of Christmas songs , you’ll see that these days I am truly nostalgic not for Percy Faith but for … Billy Joel and the Alarm. I will always love Judy Garland’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” but think of this: In 2025, we are now as far away from the Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping” as we were from Meet Me in St. Louis when I was in college back in the early 1980s. My list does not include a hundred versions of “Last Christmas” and the earworm known as “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” Allow me to offer something a little more, ah, idiosyncratic. “Christmas Wrapping,” released in 1981, has become a charmingly offbeat holiday mainstay for decades. It shouldn’t work at all as a holiday song. It’s a tale of harried urban singledom—with an admittedly happy ending—half-sung and half-rapped by the late Patty Donahue in her trademark flat-affect voice. When I was in college, the first jingle-jingle s of “Christmas Wrapping” on Boston’s FM stations meant that school was done, and that I was going to go home to see my family. The song has always marked, for me, the beginning of the season. The rest...

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