I understand that, with Halloween being a few days away yet, it feels far too early to be thinking about—much less discussing—Christmas. However, the annual Christmas party is approaching in early December, invitations are to be sent out next week and preparations need to begin.

A short bit of background about the parties our group of friends throw and attend: Music is a pretty significant part of most parties. But among us, there is some overlap of musical tastes, but not enough that a CD can be put into a player and enough of a consensus reached that the griping begins to drown out the tunes. So here’s what happens at nearly every party we’ve ever had: Someone puts in CD A. Four to five people start whining about how bad the music is. Before the first song on CD A is even done playing, someone else has snuck over to the stereo and slipped in CD B. Then the person who put CD A in plus three or four others who were like minded with the original selection begin to complain and one of them slinks toward the stereo for a coup before the second song has gotten to the halfway point…

This power struggle is universal and while I understand the sentiment, I’ve always felt the end result is far more annoying than one should have to deal with at a party. To me the obvious solution is to simply put a varied mix together that has Something For Everyone so that, worst case scenario, you only have to listen to a couple of songs you don’t like before something comes on you can groove to. Hey, in a perfect world we’d all like the same great music but instead we have to compromise sometimes.

The problem in the past has been that my carefully crafted party mixes get hijacked by stereo-sneakers who start turning off iPods or iTunes and putting in CDs, thus igniting the great Stereo Battles of the 21st Century. This year I have some ideas to help avoid that sort of thing.

My first idea is that someone (I’ll go ahead and volunteer unless someone else is more suited to the task or more willing to put in the time and effort) will be the official party DJ. The DJ’s job is simple: Set up some playlists and the music equipment/computers, manage the DJ’s table and make sure people aren’t losing interest (in a general sense) in the music and be available to take requests. The theory here is that no one really gets too bent out of shape at events (think weddings) that have official DJs because if the DJ does his/her job right, there is that healthy mix of music that keeps people’s spirits up without catering too much to any one particular taste.

My second idea is to give people plenty of advance warning about the music situation and not just offer but actively encourage requests. For example, if someone were a huge fan of The Eagles and wouldn’t feel it was a party without The Eagles playing, this would be their cue to get that CD ready to take with them to the party so they could make sure some Eagles tunes make it into the rotation. Also, since for now I’m assuming the mantle of DJ, I want to be clear that any digital tracks (within reason) that are sent ahead of time are sure to make it into the initial playlist somewhere.

In my head this works like a collaboration where everyone either: A) Sends song titles as suggestions ahead of time, B) Sends the actual mp3s ahead of time or C) Brings a CD along to the party to give as requests. The end result is a likely eclectic but healthy mix of songs that will at least occasionally make everyone happy and, if all goes according to plan, avoids seriously chapping anyone’s hide.

I do have a request for (both) loyal ironSoap readers as part of this endeavor as well. See, this is a Christmas party, and it would probably be nice to throw a few Christmas tunes in the mix. The thing is that I don’t really have any Christmas music. When you really think about it, there are actually only about two, maybe three dozen songs that qualify as Christmas tunes and what you usually end up hearing are about 9,450 variations or renditions of each song. Having done absolutely no research on this topic, I’m hoping you can give me a hand here.

What I’m looking for are the definitive versions of the Christmas classics. Is Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” really the best take on that track, or did some obscure recording put his crooning to shame? Who sings the absolute best versions of “Jingle Bell Rock,” “Little Drummer Boy” or “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen?”

In this case I’m not looking for the actual songs on mp3, just the song and artist pair. I’ll worry about tracking down the actual file or CD, I just need some of your expertise. I’ll take as many recommendations as I get (send ’em to paul@ironsoap.org with the subject “Christmas Songs”) but I don’t plan on overloading the mix with festive songs. Probably something like a four to one mix of regular songs and holiday songs (respectively) would be about right.

While We’re Not on the Subject

I ran across a very cool site yesterday that I forgot to link. There’s a guy that buys all kinds of old cameras that have undeveloped film still inside. He develops the film, scans the pics and posts them to his website. The results are fascinating, intriguing and occasionally haunting. I do wish he would lay off some of the commentary sometimes since it doesn’t often add anything to the pictures (the stuff about where the camera came from and the process used to get the pictures developed I don’t mind, but his assigning names to the subjects and trying to be cute by giving fake info about their lives is trite and manages to undermine what he’s trying to do).

Fortunately he had enough sense to let the pictures do the talking in one set of galleries that seem to come from a soldier stationed in Europe during World War II. Brilliant, fascinating stuff.