The seventeenth day of Hot Roqmas

This list of Christmas songs has been working through the alphabet as the days of December go by. Today is the letter Q, which is a tough for any alphabetical mix, especially a Christmas one. I put "It's Christmas Time" by the Qualities (Sun Ra's mid 50s doo-wop group) on last year's mix, and there's always Queen's "Thank God, It's Christmas", but for the most part, Q artists don't do Xmas.

Which is forcing me to do a bit of stretching. Tim Walters (through his various guises as Circular Firing Squad, Conjure Wife, Damnation Army, Mercaptan, Pledge Drive, Shalmaneser, and SLAW) has been a fixture on my Christmas mixes for almost as long as I've been doing them. After I put out a call for original holiday tunes in late 1999, he sent me a CD-R with seven original Christmas tracks, corresponding to the years 1993-1999 on this list. Since then, I've included a bunch of tracks by Tim and his corporate cohorts on my annual Christmas mixes. They're the one responsible for "Chanukah Nights", "Grinch Grinch Baby", "The Christmas Rush", the Perry Como-Black Sabbath "God Rest" mashup, and many others.

The crown jewel in the Doubtful Palace holiday lineup is 2003's "Christmas Rhapsody". For anyone who hasn't heard this or doesn't remember it, this is "Bohemian Rhapsody" dressed up in holiday style, so it's appropriate for the letter Q and the 17th day, and should be in heavy radio rotation during the holidays. I included it on my 2004 holiday mix (it was released too late for my 2003 mix, and didn't match the theme), and here's the mp3 from doubtfulpalace.com.

Pledge Drive - Christmas Rhapsody

If you like this, there are fourteen more years of holiday tracks (some of them are not "songs" in the traditional sense) available for download here. Keep the link bookmarked for next year!