Return to the Canon of Christmas Songs
Today in XKCD #988, Randall Munroe illustrates the point I was making in "Canon of Christmas Songs: Well Gone Dry?" back in 2000.
His take: "Every year, America embarks on a massive project to carefully recreate the Christmases of Baby Boomers' childhoods."
This doesn't quite explain why almost no Christmas songs seem to have been added to the canon since 1970. (Still true, I believe, more than a decade after I observed it.)
It would be nice to get a large database of Christmas songs (such as a list of cuts on Christmas albums) and plot frequency against "year of composition" for each song. I still haven't found an easy way to do this, nor have I pursued hard ways (Amazon API?). But Mr. Munroe's chart illustrates the effect well with just a few data points.
Edited to add: Of all the Google archives, the Google Groups archive is the nearest to the Slow Zone, and sometimes zone disturbances cause Usenet to drop out of the Beyond for days at a time. I think it wise to include the text of my Christmas canon essay here, so as not to frustrate readers who encounter erratic links.
( Behind the cut, full text of my 2000 Usenet article )
His take: "Every year, America embarks on a massive project to carefully recreate the Christmases of Baby Boomers' childhoods."
This doesn't quite explain why almost no Christmas songs seem to have been added to the canon since 1970. (Still true, I believe, more than a decade after I observed it.)
It would be nice to get a large database of Christmas songs (such as a list of cuts on Christmas albums) and plot frequency against "year of composition" for each song. I still haven't found an easy way to do this, nor have I pursued hard ways (Amazon API?). But Mr. Munroe's chart illustrates the effect well with just a few data points.
Edited to add: Of all the Google archives, the Google Groups archive is the nearest to the Slow Zone, and sometimes zone disturbances cause Usenet to drop out of the Beyond for days at a time. I think it wise to include the text of my Christmas canon essay here, so as not to frustrate readers who encounter erratic links.
( Behind the cut, full text of my 2000 Usenet article )