Featured Essay: Christmas in the Heart, and on My Turntable

by Rich Wilhelm

Two of my earliest memories of recorded music are: 1) hearing Bob Dylan’s voice; and 2) listening to Christmas records. It never occurred to me that these threads would intertwine but in 2009, they did, in the form of Dylan’s  Christmas in the Heart album. My December listening habits haven’t been the same since then. 

For several years after its release, I would deliberately refer to Christmas in the Heart as The Bob Dylan Christmas Album. It was funny (to me, anyway) and it was a way of putting an ironic distance between myself and the album, which acquired a notorious reputation the moment it hit the streets. But I don’t do that anymore because I genuinely, unironically love Christmas in the Heart.

First, some background. In the 1960s and 1970s, my parents had a small record collection, which maxed out around 100 albums at the dawn of the 1980s. I own most of Mom and Dad’s records now. Other than one or two that each of my sons may have, my sister Lisa has the rest. 

Two of the major elements in my parents’ collection were Bob Dylan albums and Christmas records. My dad was the Dylan fan, though he was hardly a completeist when it came to the albums. Dad had Greatest Hits, John Wesley Harding, New Morning, and Nashville Skyline. I mostly remember hearing the hits collection and Nashville Skyline emanating from the stereo console, a large piece of furniture that sits in Lisa’s apartment 50+ years later. 

Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits and Nashville Skyline were enormously influential on me. Even though I was, at most, six or seven years old when I first heard Greatest Hits, I remember being fascinated by the torrent of words emerging from Dylan’s brain and mouth in songs like “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” I am convinced that hearing songs with so much complex language when I was barely out of kindergarten created a love of words that ultimately led me to become a writer, both in my professional capacity and as a non-professional vocation. 

In essence, Bob Dylan made me a writer, as much as any actual writer did.

Nashville Skyline had an equally strong impact. Conventional wisdom is that the album represents a period of domestic bliss for Dylan and this makes sense. But the album represents an early domestic bliss of my own: Nashville Skyline was a presence in my life at a time when all of us — Dad, Mom, Lisa and me — were young and together as a family. 

As for Christmas music, I can’t recall whether the holiday records were filed with the rest of the collection all year long or if they were packed away, to appear with the decorations just after Thanksgiving. Mom was the keeper of the Christmas music. Her Christmas collection included:

·      The Little Drummer Boy by Harry Simeone Chorale. Growing up, I assumed that every home on this planet owned at least one copy of this album. I now know this was a wildly inaccurate conjecture.

·    A budget Elvis Presley Christmas compilation album with Presley posed in front of a snowy scene. It featured the secular tunes from his original Christmas album, along with a current new song (“If Every Day Was Like Christmas”) and, inexplicably, “Mama Liked the Roses,” a sad song that had nothing to do with Christmas.

·      The Partridge Family’s A Christmas Card to You. This is not an album that is well-remembered today, though it has been my experience that people who were exposed to it when it was new tend to be wildly enthusiastic about it, even though it contains an uncharacteristically maudlin rendition of “Frosty the Snowman,” which seems to be more about mortality than live-for-the-moment snowy fun.

·       A split Ray Conniff/Johnny Mathis record. We seemed to listen to the Conniff Singers more often than Johnny.

·      A collection by the Living Guitars.

There were also a few generic compilation albums, and a copy of Connie Francis’ Christmas in My Heart. Mom claimed she loved that one, but I don’t recall her ever spinning the vinyl, which was apparently scratched beyond repair by the time Lisa and I were on the scene.

Willie Nelson’s 1979 album, Pretty Paper, would have been a title added toward the end of Mom’s vinyl era, but it might have become her absolute favorite. 

Gradually, Dad and Mom embraced the digital age but the 1980s and compact discs have no place in this essay.

All this background leads us to that unexpected intersection of Dad and Mom’s musical interests*, Christmas in the Heart*.

The world at large probably had no idea that Bob Dylan had any interest in Christmas music until he hosted a “special Yuletide extravaganza“ episode of his Theme Time Radio Hour that has become a cult classic for Christmas music fanatics. For two hours, Dylan played a wildly eclectic selection of holiday tunes, ranted about Oliver Cromwell over a killer Jimmy Smith organ riff, and even offered an exceedingly complex recipe for figgy pudding.

Even after the Theme Time revelation, the thought of a Dylan Christmas album seemed absurd. Until, suddenly, the absurd came vividly to life in the form of Christmas in the Heart. 

I am not certain about this, but I think there might have been a moment or two after Dylan announced the upcoming release of Christmas in the Heart during which it was possible to speculate about the contents of the album. Would  it be an album of original holiday-themed songs, freshly written by Dylan? 

Maybe it would be a love letter to the blissful marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Claus (North Pole Skyline); or maybe a surgical dissection of that time when the Claus’ marriage hit a rough patch (Blood on the Wreaths)? Perhaps the Bob Dylan Christmas album would contain various apocalyptic screeds of a decidedly evangelical variety (Slow Sleigh Coming)?

In the end though, Bob Dylan did the weirdest thing of all: he made a conventional straight-outta-Mom’s-collection Christmas album. Christmas in the Heart is filled to the brim with holiday classics, both religious and secular, that you’ve heard a thousand times before: “Winter Wonderland.” “Silver Bells.” “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” All of the basics, except maybe “Jingle Bells.” 

There are a few outliers though. “Must Be Santa” is a goofball polka that postmodern polka heroes Brave Combo covered on their album, It’s Christmas, Man!. Dylan had played Brave Combo’s version on the ThemeTime show and his version sticks closely to their version, other than when the backing singers inexplicably shout out the names of several recent U.S. presidents. Because of course they do. 

Meanwhile, Dylan’s  “Christmas Island” conjures mental images of Bob receiving leis and maybe even doing some impromptu hula dances. I am fine with this, though results obviously will vary. 

As for the sound and feel of Christmas in the Heart, Dylan was clearly aiming to create the kind of mainstream Christmas album that everybody from Andy Williams to Ray Conniff to Don Ho was making in the 1960s and 1970s. Everything about the album has that suburban living room Christmas album vibe, even as the album’s feel hints at a rustic, Americana sound. Los Lobos member and National Treasure David Hidalgo blesses Christmas in the Heart with his presence on guitar, accordion, mandolin, and violin. 

Dylan’s homage to allegedly-square holiday records is epitomized by the liberal use of backing singers who populate many of the tunes. These “mixed voice singers” (per the liner notes) provide an odd counterpoint to Dylan’s craggy vocals, which is the quality that sets Christmas in the Heart off from any other holiday record you’ve heard.

Christmas in the Heart was released on Oct. 13, 2009 and was received with a general air of confusion, amusement, and apathy by the world in general. Dylan defended the album, noting that Christmas songs felt like folk music to him. Dylan also pledged all profits from the album in perpetuity to charitable organizations combating hunger.

Let me be clear: even as a devoted Bob Dylan fan, I have always found the existence of what I used to call The Bob Dylan Christmas Album to be hilarious. But let me be equally clear: I have grown to love Christmas in the Heart. I love that Dylan is singing the holiday songs everybody else has already sung. I love Dylan’s vocals and I love the playing. I love the enigmatic cover art. 

Mostly, I love how, decades after the fact, Christmas in the Heart ties together two of my earliest experiences with records: Dad’s Dylan albums and Mom’s Christmas records.

For most of its existence, I only owned Christmas in the Heart on CD. A few years back though, during a challenging holiday season when I wasn’t merry much of the time, I took a few minutes to finally order the Bob Dylan Christmas album on vinyl. These days, throughout December, Christmas in the Heart isn’t just in my heart. It’s on my turntable as well. 

Merry Christmas and I hope you hear the music that makes you happiest this season, and all year ‘round!

Rich Wilhelm is a writer and record collector who lives in Royersford, Pennsylvania. Rich is the news editor for the communications department at ASTM International. He has written extensively for Cool and Strange Music Magazine, PopMatters, and his own website, The Dichotomy of the Dog. Rich is also a certified volunteer tour guide at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Rich can be found on social media at Bluesky (@rfwilhelm.bsky.social).