🎄🎧 Last Christmas
Yesterday I noticed my younger daughters were singing and humming the tune of Last Christmas around the house and I was kind of puzzled. So I asked them, "Where did you hear that?" Mary plays Christmas tunes around the house during December, but her tastes tend toward A Charlie Brown Christmas, White Christmas, and more traditional carols. I mostly tend to listen to music on headphones because of the number of random explicit tracks that come up that I don't want to subject our house to. So I didn't think they'd specifically heard it from us. Turns out Last Christmas does play fairly frequently on the radio station Mary listens to in the car this time of year and Nathan had also been playing it for them too. So why do I even care about this Wham! song from four decades ago1 anyway?
Well, it really comes down to the way it reminds me of my dad, who passed away twenty-three years ago. He was always a fan of pop music and Wham! was probably his favorite group during my childhood in the mid-80s. I heard a lot of Careless Whisper and the other hits from Make It Big during those years. I'm not sure when Last Christmas filtered into my consciousness, but I feel like it was at least a decade later in the mid-90s after Wham! had broken up.
The funny thing is that my association between the song and my dad is purely tangential too. I don't have any specific memories of him and the song itself (which came out as a single before Make It Big was even in the family awareness, let alone a cassette we owned), but he was a Wham! fan and it's exactly the kind of wistful pop song that he loved. I can completely imagine him singing along while driving to a high school basketball game at this time of year even if I never actually heard him do that.
Yesterday I started listening to an Electronic Christmas playlist Spotify generated for me and I was tickled this morning to realize that it had three different covers of Last Christmas. After it finished Spotify randomly played a fourth. I should really put together a playlist of all the Last Christmas covers I can find.
Besides the fact that it's a complete ear-worm that his topped the charts in some fashion during this time of year for four decades straight.↩