When you hear yet another arrangement of “Deck the Halls” or “Santa Baby” in a store, do you merrily sing along? Or do you count the minutes till you can go home and enjoy your own record collection, with its true classics, its obscurities, and its limited-edition prestige?
If you were Sean Passmore, you wouldn’t have to choose. As Carsten Knox reports in The Coast, the Halifax record store employee is a Christmas music fanatic, with a personal collection of 2,000 Christmas albums. These include standards–Bing Crosby, Dolly Parton, Charlie Brown–along with less predictable fare: a bluegrass compilation from Sugar Hill Records, a collection of “song poems” with lyrics solicited via advertisement, a Mojo Nixon record called Horny Holidays.
After realizing that most of his friends owned no more than a couple of Christmas albums, Passmore started making personalized Christmas mix tapes for friends each fall–something he’s now been doing for more than 20 years. “People grow up with these albums–it’s the soundtrack to their childhood Christmas,” he explained to Knox. “People are always looking for them.”
(Thanks, AltWeeklies.com.)
—Steve Thorngate