Christmas is a wonderful time of year.

It’s a celebration with memories and traditions that take me back to my childhood. We would go out, pick out a tree, then bring it into the house and decorate it. It was when the manger scene went up on the hearth, when mom baked her collection of Christmas cookies, when presents slowly piled up underneath, and our family would go to enough church services to hit a yearly quota.

The official kickoff for this special season was when the Sears Christmas catalog arrived in the mail. That allowed us to see for ourselves what you were going to ask Santa for that year. To help the old guy out, we sometimes cut out the pictures of the toys we wanted and pasted them in our annual suck-up letter to the Claus, hoping that he wasn’t too careful checking that naughty-and-nice list of his.

The more holiday seasons you live through, it seems the more traditions you include in that “It ain’t Christmas unless I” collection. We probably have a lot of them in common–need to watch, “Christmas Vacation”, “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Carol.” (at least one version) Then there’s putting up decorations, sending out Christmas cards, and of course, the shopping.

But besides all those normal routines, I’ve developed a collection of rather unique traditions of my own. There was the Santa Claus arrival where I was the official Town Crier for 18 years at Country Village in Bothell, but that appears to have run its course. In 2000, I began a tradition of assembling a collection of Christmas songs, comedy bits and audio memorabilia and making a CD that I called, “Ho Ho Brother.”  This year’s 18th edition is among the best. You can listen to it here just by clicking on this link.

Then, another tradition was added into my holiday season routine six years ago. My radio brother-from-another-mother Scott Burns introduced me to a young singer named Alana Baxter. I wrote a parody song about Christmas, she lent her voice to the project and we even shot a video to go along with it.  We started strong and have just kept getting better at it. Yeah, I’m being too modest.

We’re managed to pull this special effort five of the last six Christmas seasons and this year’s endeavor was among the toughest. With all my jobs and side-hustles, plus my recently-added radio gig, the time to make this happen just wasn’t there. But I swapped sleep for writing lyrics, got ’em to her and we went into express mode.

Friday, December 21st, Alana came by and she recorded the song. I mixed down a rough version and then we drove up to Bothell’s Country Village to shoot the video. I really wanted to showcase the Village one more time before the scheduled wrecking balls turn it into a memory next spring.

This year, we’ve twisted the lyrics to Stevie Wonder’s “Someday at Christmas.”  Stevie’s version was about world peace and ending war and much more noble efforts. Our version is just about all those things that go wrong at Christmas and drive us crazy. But then again, are they just things or could they actually be traditions? I’ll leave that one up to you.

Another amazing thing about this year’s video. It was shot entirely on my iPhone Xs. It’s my first-ever iPhone and they have completely won me over.

Finished in time for the holiday and destined to be part of my 2019 Ho Ho Brother CD, here’s “Someday at Christmas” by Alana Baxter. Enjoy.

And Merry Christmas!

Tim Hunter