This song is as traditional as they come for me, and an absolutely essential song for my list. I grew up marking my calendar every year for the various Rankin-Bass stop-motion animation Christmas shows (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer; Santa Claus is Coming to Town), and "Holly Jolly Christmas" is sung in Rudolph by his character Sam the Snowman.
Hearing this song today transports me back to the 1970s, when a Christmas list was formed in the fall with the advent of the Christmas catalogs from Sears, JCPenney, and Montgomery Ward, and sealed with a letter to Santa Claus (with a copy for my parents, too, of course). Once Thanksgiving had passed, you checked the local TV listings to see when the Christmas shows would air.
This was long before streaming video, before DVDs and satellite television (unless you were super-rich), even before VCRs, and in a lot of places, cable television. You had one chance to see the various Christmas specials, and if you missed it, you had to wait AN ENTIRE YEAR before they aired again.
Needless to say, part of a child's prayers back in the day included no bad weather to interfere with the TV signal, and for the sake of the Baby Jesus, no presidential address to pre-empt the show. Back to the song...it's nothing special musically, but the memories associated make it a must to include for me.
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