Considering the bleak happenings that have defined 2020, we can all be thankful for one grand unifying event that restored a little bit of our faith in humanity: Jonas Kaufmann released a Christmas album. Not just any Christmas album: a two-hour, 42-track deluxe set of everything from traditional Alpine tunes (“Es wird scho glei dumpa”) to 20th-century standards (“White Christmas”) to… Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You.” It is, as one might expect, a glorious overstuffed train wreck of gingerbread men, gumdrops, and frankincense that oozes figgy pudding and whose scent (somewhere between peppermint schnapps and Douglas fir) lingers for days. God bless us all, everyone. In the spirit of coming together in the most socially-distanced of ways, we set up a Zoom listening party for “It’s Christmas!” with two people we knew would be ideal sleigh ride partners: musicologist Aksel Tollåli and retroviral immunology PhD candidate, violinist, and Mariah Careyologist Kevin Ng. Alcohol was the fifth guest.
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