John Lucas

Confession time: I don’t generally enjoy listening to Frank Sinatra. I think it’s because, to my ears, he invariably sounds as if he doesn’t actually believe a word he’s singing. And that makes his occasional half-assed attempts at sincerity feel forced and smarmy.

I will make an exception at Christmas, however, because if I wasn’t willing to put up with a certain degree of forced sincerity and smarminess, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy and Christmas music at all. (And I know many people who don’t.)

Having said all that, I was very happy to randomly discover a few years ago, on YouTube, a 1957 episode of The Frank Sinatra Show in which Bing Crosby pops by and the two crooners either do a very good job at acting shitfaced or actually are not just pretending to drink wassail. And, let’s face it, this is Bing Crosby we’re talking about, so you just know something was being smoked off-screen.

We have since made an annual tradition of watching “Happy Holidays With Bing and Frank”. I almost had a panic attack one year when it disappeared from YouTube; fortunately, I was able to find it on Vimeo and have since invested in a DVD, just in case.

The show begins as it means to carry on, even before Crosby shows up, with Old Blue Eyes decorating his Christmas tree with candy canes (apparently very sticky ones) and other ornaments, missing the tree altogether at least once, and singing his latest single, “Mistletoe and Holly”, in a way that makes it sound as if his very soul is shrugging.

I’m being slightly facetious, of course. I do actually love this particular piece of pop-culture ephemera unironically, and it’s certainly much less depressing than the Christmas episode of The Judy Garland Show (which we also watch every year against our better judgment).

But in the hell has pheasant for Christmas dinner?