I first fell in love with Christmas music at the age of five. It was December of 1968 and — like many households around North America — our family was listening to Nat ‘King’ Cole. But what captivated me wasn’t his “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” but the flipside, an obscure Yuletide melody called “The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot”.
The notion that Santa could forget anyone, let alone a child like me, was terrifying. Between choruses, Cole’s rich baritone delivers several spoken word stanzas and it was hearing these that made me feel as if he was right there in the room, speaking directly to me.
This particular Christmas season coincided with the crumbling of my parents’ marriage and I became obsessed with the idea that, like Santa, Nat King Cole had some magical insight into my own life.
Not grasping the fact that Nat’s soliloquy was a pre-recorded track, I pestered my mother to play it over and over again, hoping to find out how the boy’s story, and my own, would end.
Skip forward twenty years and the magical appeal of Christmas music became a full-fledged mania when, in a flea market, I discovered Miles Davis’s “Blue Xmas (To Whom it May Concern)” featuring caustic vocals by Bob Dorough — who also wrote the tune.
This mid-’60s bebop classic put a decidedly unsentimental spin on the season. And the idea that someone would be critical of Christmas, especially in a song, was a revelation to me.
As a child, I liked how Christmas wiped out reality for a few weeks. It still feels that way to me now.
The season and the music is still as escapist, sentimental, silly and (sometimes) spiritual as when I was five years old.
Today’s holiday season is a volatile concoction of the ridiculous and the sublime, the sacred and the profane. As we muddle our way through the stresses and expectations of the season, Christmas music can remind us why we go to so much trouble.
It can restore our sense of wonder, immerse us in nostalgia, instill a sentimental fantasy or create an entirely new musical experience of how the holiday ought to be. Some people love it, and others hate it, but almost everyone seems to have an opinion.
For those who love it, Christmas music helps us connect — to each other, to our pasts, to a centuries-old communal experience — all in a peculiarly modern way.
No other musical genre flows through the bloodstream of popular culture like Christmas music does. Our appetite for it seems insatiable, but it comes and goes so predictably each year that few, if any of us, ever stop to consider what it really means.
Featuring some of the merriest and most fascinating songs ever inspired by the festive season, JINGLE BELL ROCKS! opens our eyes and ears to an irreverent musical universe where cynical songs co-exist with heartfelt one-hit wonders, where the merry mash-ups of today challenge the chestnuts of old, and where perennial favourites keep company with a host of seasonal pop oddities. In doing so, the film reveals the many faces of the holiday — love and longing, irony and hope, sentiment and spirituality — and the uniqueness of the music that takes us there.
Director’s Bio
Mitchell Kezin is a graduate of the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design. His first film Steam: A journey aboard the Royal Hudson won Best Short documentary at the 1993 Montreal World Film Festival and was acquired for the permanent collection of the National Archives of Canada. His feature, Haro, had its world premiere in the Panorama Canada section at The Montreal World Film Festival the following year.
In 1999 Mitchell received the Telefilm Canada/National Screen Institute Drama Prize for the short film Dissonance, which he co-wrote, produced, and directed. Dissonance has screened at festivals around the world, including MOSFEST film festival in Moscow, Russia and SUPERFEST XXI (Media Festival on Disability) in Berkeley, California, where it won an Award of Achievement for Writing and Direction.
In addition to JINGLE BELL ROCKS!, Mitchell has several non-fiction films and features in development: A World without Santa, GG & Me about Canadian book collector John Meier, as well as the one-hour TV doc Steam II: The Restoration (a special presentation - in partnership with the Ministry of BC and the West Coast Railway Museum - that chronicles the history and present restoration of Canada’s legendary steam locomotive in advance of the OPENING NIGHT TORCH-LIGHTING CEREMONY of the 2010 Olympic Games in Whistler, B.C.)
He is also writing an original feature-length screenplay, The Sound of Being Watched with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.
Mitchell is an alumnus of the Berlinale Talent Campus (an initiative of the Berlin International Film Festival), the Canadian Screen Training Centre, The National Screen Institute and the inaugural Hot Doc’s DOC LAB. He is a member of DOC BC, Cineworks filmmaker’s co-operative and a former disc jockey and radio host on Vancouver Co-operative Radio 102.7. He still believes in Santa Claus.
