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The usual canon of Christmas songs may not really fit people's moods in this year 2020, when I'm not sure a lot of us are feeling all that holly jolly. So I drafted in singer and songwriter Jenny Owen Youngs and we wrote a festive song that is suitable for 2020.
Content note: there are swears. Several of them.
EXTRA MATERIALS:
Check out the previous festive Allusionist episodes, absolute bangers, one and all! We’ve got Winterval, a jolly romp through a portmanteau that sparked another war on the war on Christmas; How The Dickens Stole Christmas, about how Charles Dickens became a festive trend-setter; Dear Santa, about how a load of letters to Santa got delivered to a couple in Manhattan, who set out to answer them; and Xmas Man, about the many names for Santa/Father Christmas/St Nick, and deathy and meaty Victorian Christmas cards.
Haggard Hawks explains the etymology of shit-twig mistletoe.
‘Merry-bout: "an incident of sexual intercourse".’ You also need to read the etymology of ‘merry’!
See the Allusionist elves’ lists of frequently occurring words in the Christmas song corpus.
The Waitresses on how they made ‘Christmas Wrapping’.
Do you love the film The Holiday? I don’t, but I do love the podcast The Holiday Season, which is all about it!
If you want to listen to ‘Don’t Wait For Me Beneath The Mistletoe’ without podcast on either side, it’s available on The Allusionettes’ Bandcamp, YouTube, and on Spotify and Apple if you search for ‘Allusionettes’. And you can get a swear-free version now too!
All sales of the song will be donated to the Trussell Trust, and I’ll match the donation, so if you buy it you’ll be getting a festive banger and feeding people in need.
YOUR RANDOMLY SELECTED WORD FROM THE DICTIONARY:
yarak
CREDITS:
Jenny Owen Youngs makes music - find it at jennyowenyoungs.com - and podcasts - Buffering the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars Investigations. She’s @jennyowenyoungs on Twitter and Instagram. And she’s playing a festive livestream this Saturday, which I highly recommend getting tickets for; 2019’s show was a highlight of my year.
Martin Austwick provided music, backing vocals and linguistic analysis. Hear Martin’s own songs via palebirdmusic.com or on Spotify etc, and he’s @martinaustwick on Twitter and Instagram. He also composed the music for the kids’ science podcast Maddie’s Sound Explorers.
I, Helen Zaltzman, produced the episode, and provided lyrics and vocals. Apologies.
Find the show at twitter.com/allusionistshow, facebook.com/allusionistshow, twitter.com/helenzaltzman and instagram.com/allusionistshow.
The Allusionist has left the Radiotopia network, and if you’re able and inclined to support the show, head over to patreon.com/allusionist.
Also: I recently did a short series of talks with podcasters for Scripps College, which I think you’ll enjoy. The first is with Lory Martinez and James Kim, talking about making multilingual fiction and immigrant stories in their podcasts Mija and Moonface. The second is with Phoebe Unter and Ariel Mejia about radical truth-telling on podcasts including The Heart and Bitchface. Hear them on Spotify, where there’ll soon also be an Allusionist one about the future of language.
