Music to Watch Christmas Elves By (2023 Edition)

My annual roundup of vintage Xmas muzak mixes

Dec 03, 2023

Christmas in downtown Chicago, 2016. Photo by me.

Several years ago around this time, I discovered that a veritable motherlode of 1960s and 70s Christmas muzak mixes — of the sort made specifically to enhance the retail experience of holiday shoppers at department stores like Kresge and K-Mart — existed on the internet, a discovery that delighted me in more or less the same way that the discoveries of Troy and Mycenae must have delighted Heinrich Schliemann.

Nothing transports me back to the giddy bliss of my childhood Christmases quite like the canned holiday-themed easy listening of yore. Yes, I realize that some of you folks will find my obsession with these particular sounds completely perverse. But I’m a big believer in taking (comfort and) joy wherever you may find it, especially in the musical realms; and this Xmas Muzak makes me indescribably happy, even despite its total lack of funk, fuzz or any other redeemably edgy qualities.

And I know that there are many others out there who feel the same way, which is why for many Decembers now I’ve posted an ongoing Facebook thread linking to as much of these holiday cheese platters as I can find. Last year, I moved the party over here to Jagged Time Lapse, where the tradition continues today...

So if Xmas music of the schmaltzy, dreamy and supremely smooth variety lights your Yule log, you’ll want to pull up a hot toddy and wrap yourself in this soothing aural wallpaper — and you’ll definitely want to bookmark this page. The mixes I’ve found are all embedded here for your immediate holiday listening pleasure; but if you’re still into downloading digital music files, the links to them will be included where applicable. (All old links here have been double-checked to make sure that they still work, and a few new ones have been added since last year.)

Let’s kick the festivities off with this K-Mart Christmas 1974 mix (nearly 2 hours of the good stuff, which can also be downloaded here from the Internet Archive)…

And then there’s… the 1960's Supermarket During The Holidays Playlist (Metro Strings, Tony Vale, Medallion Orchestra, etc., video comes complete with vintage retail images).

S. S. Kresge Christmas Background Music Record No. 219C (46 minutes of unidentified artists, mostly of the orchestral and organ-oriented variety.)

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