What Are Your Favorite Holiday Songs?

By Jessica Gardner, November 25, 2013 at 7:20 pm

Christmas is my favorite holiday (aside from my birthday, which is June 16, if you want to mark it on your calendar) and I love everything about it. Decorations. Church music. Popular music. Fruit Cake (oh, God, how I love my Nana’s Fruit Cake). But the music is the absolute best part of it.

If you live in the Chicago Area, you know that 93.9 MY FM (formerly Lite FM) is known for it’s 24/7 holiday format from early November through Christmas Day.

I’m not a fan of holiday creep, you know when stores begin marketing holidays months before they happen and in advance of other equally important and fun to celebrate holidays. I don’t think any big holiday is immune to this, but Christmas seems to be the worst. I saw Christmas decorations in Costco before Labor Day this year. In my opinion, that’s at least two months too early. When I decorate for Christmas, which I’m not really doing this year, I do it the day after Thanksgiving. Not before Thanksgiving.

In one of the greatest bits of hypocrisy ever, although I loathe holiday creep, I will eagerly listen to Christmas music all year long and I love that 93.9 caters to my love of the genre by devoting their station to 24/7 Holiday music by mid-November.

Surely you’re eager to know what Holiday Songs have earned a place in my heart as one of my favorites. These are just a few of my favorites. If I listed them all with their embedded videos, we’d all be here until Christmas.

O Holy Night, Josh Groban version

Handel’s Messiah, The Choir of King’s College version

The video above is the entire piece of music. It’s over 2 1/2 hours in length.

This video is just the Hallelujah Chorus by the Johann Strauss Orchestra and the Harlem Gospel Choir.