Music to Watch Christmas Elves By

Attention shoppers! Here's my annual celebration of the Xmas Muzak of yore

Dec 04, 2022

Profound apologies for being MIA for the last week or so — between Thanksgiving, deadlines and moving into a new pad in scenic Kerhonkson, NY, Jagged Time Lapse has definitely been lapsing. But welcome to all the new JTL subscribers, and continued thanks to all y’all for your continued support of this here endeavor…

As I mentioned back when I first launched this Substack, music has been my main obsession for most of my life, and Jagged Time Lapse is a place where I can share and celebrate that obsession in its many forms. And one of those forms happens to be Christmas Muzak — yes, that spritely, smooth and schmaltzy stuff they used to pump through department store PAs in the pre-Mariah Carey days to put shoppers in the holiday spirit.

“Bah, Humbug!” some folks say. “Epstein, you sick fuck,” say others. I don’t care — I absolutely love this stuff. One of the most powerful aspects of music is its transportive abilities, and this particular music instantly teleports me back to the magical holidays of my childhood.

Christmas was always a really happy time for me when I was a kid. It usually meant traveling to other cities to visit relatives I loved, marveling at incredible light and shop displays, and of course the intense anticipation of whatever goodies Santa in his various guises was gonna lay on me.

My adult Christmases have, naturally, been far more complicated, and this Christmas — my first since 2009 as a single person — offers up a particularly bittersweet box of ornaments to sort through. But I take time every holiday season to reconnect with that little kid who was totally stoked about “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” and who floated wide-eyed through the aisles and past the windows of bustling retail meccas like Arborland, Gimbels, Hudson’s, Bullocks Wilshire, May Co., Marshall Field’s, Lord & Taylor, and yes even Kresge’s and K-Mart to the dreamy accompaniment of Christmas Muzak.

For the past several years, I’ve posted an annual early-December thread on Facebook rounding up the various K-Mart and Kresge easy-listening holiday mixes designed for 1960s and 70s holiday shoppers that have popped up on the Internet Archive and elsewhere. This year, we’re taking the party and bringing it over to my house! (The tapes are embedded here for your immediate holiday listening pleasure — but if you’re into downloading digital files, the links will be included where applicable.)

So if you dig your Xmas tunes schmaltzy, dreamy and smooth, come envelop yourself in this soothing aural wallpaper from the days of yore. And if you don't, well, in the immortal words of James Brown, believers shall enjoy — non-believers shall suffer! Happy Holidays!

K-Mart Christmas 1974 (Kicking things off with nearly 2 hours of the good stuff, which can also be downloaded here from the Internet Archive.)

S. S. Kresge Christmas Background Music No. 261 (41 minutes of joy from the Three Suns, Hollyridge Strings, Bert Kaempfert and others. Download here.)

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