The 25 days of Christmas: Day 7

Another TV song, but reimagined.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’m a big fan of Saturday Night Live. Always have been, even during the rough periods (and there have been a few). The electricity of doing 90 minutes of live, original comedy once a week is marvelous, and when it’s good it’s great, a hybrid between comedy and high-wire act whose effect is intensified by the immediacy of knowing it’s live and there’s no safety net.

On December 9, 2000 SNL aired a musical skit so infectious that they went on to perform variations on it another six or seven times over the years. It was called “I Wish It Was Christmas Today,” and its simplicity and absence of irony immediately made it pop out from SNL’s usual fare. It was simple, kind of dumb, and moderately catchy, and it clearly was mostly ad-libbed in the moment—one of those skits that probably take longer to perform than to write. Best of all was that the four performers—Horatio Sanz, Jimmy Fallon, Chris Kattan, and Tracy Morgan—were clearly having the time of their lives as they did what amounted to improv on national TV.

That song (video link in case you don’t know it) is not today’s song of the day.

Sometime in 2009, Julian Casablancas, lead singer of The Strokes and all-around awesome cool person, recorded a cover of “I Wish It Was Christmas Today” (sometimes called “Christmas Treat”). That is today’s song of the day, and it is shockingly great, or in the words of one of the YouTube commenters, “one of the least annoying Christmas songs I’ve ever heard”:

Notes:

• Casablancas played the song on Jimmy Fallon’s show in 2009 along with Fallon, Sanz, and The Roots, and the performance is triumphantly joyous.

• If you don’t know The Strokes, you should dig into their back catalog. Everything they’ve ever done is great, including their 2020 album The New Abnormal. Tight, high-energy power pop that never gets old.

• I suppose I have to mention that the four cast members who originally sang this song have gone down wildly different paths in the intervening 23 years. We’ve all got troubles, some of our own making and some not. Enjoy the good stuff, learn from the bad, keeping moving forward.