{"id":178762,"date":"2025-12-07T05:10:14","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T05:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/178762\/"},"modified":"2025-12-07T05:10:14","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T05:10:14","slug":"im-dreaming-of-a-mild-and-slightly-damp-christmas-just-like-the-ones-we-know-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/178762\/","title":{"rendered":"I\u2019m dreaming of a mild and slightly damp Christmas, just like the ones we know \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sooner or later we\u2019ll all be Ariana Grande<\/a>. We\u2019ll be living out our own versions of Winter Things, her 2015 song, by indulging in that strangest of seasonal traditions: pretending it\u2019s colder and snowier than it actually is.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt ain\u2019t even cold outside, not where I\u2019m from \/ Feeling like it\u2019s mid-July under the sun,\u201d the singer from Boca Raton, Florida, sings at the start of this modern festive classic.<\/p>\n

Winter Things is one of those Christmas<\/a> songs that is conscious of its delusions. Grande\u2019s jacket \u201cdon\u2019t get no love\u201d, she can forget about hats and gloves, and most of her friends are at the beach. <\/p>\n

Why is this a problem? Well, her \u201cbaby\u2019s in town\u201d, and the allure of cosy romance imagery from cooler climates is so strong that she feels compelled to \u201cdo some winter things\u201d with him. These include ice-skating at a downtown rink \u201ceven though it\u2019s 100 degrees\u201d and fantasising about laughing by the fireside of her non-existent Arctic cabin.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s far from the only festive song to address the fact that not everyone lives in the London of A Christmas Carol or the New York of Miracle on 34th Street.<\/p>\n

The much-covered Mele Kalikimaka (Merry Christmas), from 1949, gives us an island greeting \u201cfrom the land where palm trees sway\u201d and Christmas will be \u201cgreen and bright\u201d, aka Hawaii. <\/p>\n

On 100 Degrees, from 2015, Kylie Minogue<\/a> plays to both hemispheres, contending that, whether it\u2019s \u201cmulled wine or cocktail time\u201d, it\u2019s \u201cstill Christmas\u201d. <\/p>\n

The title of White Wine in the Sun, Tim Minchin<\/a>\u2019s 2009 ode to an Australian family Christmas, speaks for itself.<\/p>\n

These songs are distinct from the ever-expanding subset of offerings where the temperature is magically delinked from external conditions and instead depends on the comings and goings of another person.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy arms so lovin\u2019 \/ a kind of oven,\u201d Julie London claims on Warm December, from 1956. It\u2019s the sort of trick that would save a lot of money on heating bills.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m more partial to It Doesn\u2019t Often Snow at Christmas, a 1997 song by the Pet Shop Boys<\/a>, which is one of the few to tackle the great weather lie we all just seem to go along with in this part of the world once the festive-music season tinkles into being.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt doesn\u2019t often snow at Christmas \/ The way it\u2019s meant to do,\u201d Neil Tennant sings. Luckily, he\u2019s got one of those human radiators to hand, as he concludes, \u201cBut I\u2019ll still have a glow at Christmas \/ Because I\u2019ll be with you.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be fair to Bing Crosby<\/a>, who the Pet Shop Boys appear to momentarily berate on their track, he\u2019s only dreaming of a white Christmas; he\u2019s not insisting they\u2019re a universal norm.<\/p>\n

Estimated to be the biggest-selling single of all time, White Christmas is the product of the ache that its composer, Irving Berlin<\/a>, reportedly felt for his New York home while spending Christmas in Beverly Hills in 1937. After its wartime release in 1942, it became the definitive template for festive nostalgia.<\/p>\n

The idea that a proper Christmas involves snow remains so ingrained in the cultural imagination that on Better Than Snow, a 2023 song by Norah Jones<\/a> and Laufey, someone is informed that \u201cChristmas with you is better than snow.\u201d That\u2019s not the highest praise, is it?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to tempt fate, but there hasn\u2019t been a white Christmas in Ireland since 2010. No child can remember one. Any yearning among adults for snowiness on December 25th owes more to the combined efforts of Berlin, Charles Dickens<\/a> and George Michael<\/a> than it does to our lived experience of snow.<\/p>\n

The good news for the legacy of Last Christmas is that Saas-Fee, the Alpine village where the Wham! video was filmed in 1984, isn\u2019t one of those lower-altitude ski resorts that have awkwardly found themselves shy of snow in recent winters.<\/p>\n

Still, as the planet heats up, and real-life memories of a white Christmas melt away, those snowy mid-century American perennials will only sound increasingly incongruous to chalet-deprived ears.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can be wherever if we visualise,\u201d a loved-up Grande suggests on Winter Things. Indeed, most years it would take either considerable visualisation or an extreme quantity of hot chocolate to transform Dublin into a marshmallow world. When I\u2019m battling along Grafton Street, blinded by low sun and trying not to be strangled by my own scarf, I can categorically say I am not walking in a winter wonderland and don\u2019t want to hear that song.<\/p>\n

Frosty the Snowman promises he\u2019ll be back someday. At the rate we\u2019re going he might only make a return if ocean currents collapse and Ireland is plunged into the sort of big freeze where the weather outside really is frightful and lovin\u2019 arms fail to help. <\/p>\n

We\u2019ll be dreaming of a mild and slightly damp Christmas, just like the ones we used to know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sooner or later we\u2019ll all be Ariana Grande. We\u2019ll be living out our own versions of Winter Things,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":178763,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9484,8420,97425,72799,93,40326,61,60,97428,32038,7241,97427,97426,97429],"class_list":{"0":"post-178762","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-christmas","9":"tag-ariana-grande","10":"tag-bing-crosby","11":"tag-charles-dickens","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-george-michael","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-irving-berlin","17":"tag-kylie-minogue","18":"tag-laura-slattery","19":"tag-norah-jones","20":"tag-pet-shop-boys","21":"tag-tim-minchin"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}