Christmas Countdown Entry 2

My parents were also big on Christmas. After Thanksgiving, the tree would go up, and we'd start pulling all our Christmas music out of storage. It's led to some weird songs ending up on my HAVE TO LISTEN TO list every year ( Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers' "Once Upon a Christmas" is pretty high up there, embarrassingly enough), but also some really great stuff, like Nat King Cole's Christmas Favorites, Andy Williams' The Andy Williams Christmas Album, and Anne Murray's Christmas Wishes, are also albums that starred next to that somewhat humiliating (but well loved!) Dolly and Kenny contribution.

The Christmas music collection was kept upstairs in an extra closet in my bedroom- most of them were tapes, but there were also lots of albums, real, true vinyl records, like Nat and Andy. My parents owned a large stereo record player that they'd inherited from my mom's parents, and there was nothing like the first few moments before you heard Nat King Cole start to sing The Christmas Song, when you heard the crackles of the needle floating on the record. Both my sister and I loved that moment...it's the very definition of delicious, and one of my favorite Christmas memories.