Since November began on a Thursday this year, that means Thanksgiving occurred on the earliest date possible, meaning that “Black Friday” is presently occurring on the earliest date possible, meaning that the “Christmas season” will be as long as calendarically possible this year. (A full 33 days, up to and including Christmas, a phenomenon that has not occurred since 2007. Next year, with November starting on a Friday, for example, we will have the shortest Christmas season possible – 27 days.)

I’m not sure if there is a name for the years when the calendar lines up to give us the longest stretch of time possible between Thanksgiving and Christmas, thus, giving us that much more time to shop, decorate, anticipate, dread, and be inundated with Christmas carols and commercials where people are inexplicably buying each other entire vehicles for Christmas. (Gluttony of Christmas? Embarrassment of Christmas Riches? Christmas Til you Drop?) Or, most appropriately, maybe, A Very Sufjan Stevens Christmas.

It seems like nobody may appreciate more than Stevens the concept of having as many days as humanly possible to revel in the bewildering, inherent contradictions that seem to exist between the origins of Christmas, the traditions that have developed around it and its present-day treatment as a holiday that has been commercialized into a parody of what we previously thought a commercialized Christmas might even look like. (See: Black Friday.)

The 33-day Christmas season not only gives us the most amount of time possible to reflect on the Sufjan Stevens Christmas philosophy, it also, conveniently, gives him the longest amount of time possible to conduct a Christmas-themed tour, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, that starts tonight in Philadelphia and finishes on December 22 in New York. (As you may know, Sufjan Claus will be coming to town on December 18.) As a tribute to it being A Very Sufjan Stevens Christmas year, and in anticipation of his upcoming trip to Buffalo, we’ll be taking a look at Stevens’ ideas about Christmas via his new album, Silver & Gold.

Silver & Gold is a quintuple-Christmas-album containing 58 songs recorded between 2006 and 2012. It’s the follow-up to his first quintuple-Christmas-album, called Songs for Christmas, released in 2006. Thus, these latest five albums are actually volumes 6-10 in the Stevens Christmas pantheon. Given the breadth of material to work with here, and the aptness of spreading this narrative about the Christmas season out over the Christmas season itself, we’ll be looking at these albums one-by-one each Friday from now until the holiday.

The schedule will, thus, (hopefully) be as follows: November 23: Vol. 6 – Gloria, November 30: Vol. 7 – I Am Santa’s Helper, December 7: Vol. 8 – Christmas Infinity Voyage, December 14: Vol. 9 – Let it Snow, December 21: Vol. 10 – Christmas Unicorn.

Volume 6, Gloria, is the earliest material here. It was recorded shortly after the latest material on Songs for Christmas (2006-2007) and, thus, has much in common with Volume 5 of that album. This means that the work here is also more reflective of Stevens’ pre-electric phase and that the songs are generally performed with the more traditional folk instrumentation found on Illinois and The Avalanche. “Gloria” probably intends to make reference to “Gloria in excelsis Deo,” Latin for “Glory to God in the highest,” on at least some level, a popular sentiment in Christianity around its most ubiquitous holiday. On another, slightly less reverent level, this is also likely a send-up of the idea of praising the “glory” of God at all when the present seasonal culture has so clearly adopted a different set of priorities. Stevens’ struggles with the religious/secular and traditional/contemporary are well represented in the eight songs on the album.

I’ve always thought of Christmas songs as generally falling into two categories. First, there’s the more recent, non-religious fare, generally written during and after the World War era of the 20^th century and focusing on either Santa Claus or the winter season in general. For some reason, I’ve always felt like “Santa Clause is Coming to Town” is the de facto “king” of these secular songs and I tend to see them in my head in shades of red and white. On the other side are the older, more traditional, often religious, songs that hail from the 19^th century and beyond. Again, in my own mind, I’ve always seen “Silent Night” as the leader of these songs that appear to me in hues of blues and blacks. “Santa Clause is Coming to Town” and “Silent Night” sit on either side of my brain like the final two contestants in a tournament bracket: droves of songs behind them, cheering them on (like a musical version of the South Park, Spirit of Christmas - Jesus vs. Santa short.) This seems to be a conflict Stevens appreciates as well.

On Gloria we have four traditional songs from the “Silent Night bracket” and four original songs that Stevens penned with Aaron and Bryce Dessner from The National.

The album starts with the aforementioned “Silent Night,” a song that Stevens teased as the first song on Songs for Christmas, but never gave a full rendering.  Written by two Austrians in the early 19^th century, it’s a quietly powerful song that covers all the angles on the traditional birth-of-the-savior narrative and simply sounds like a song not to be challenged. Stevens treats it fairly reverently with acoustic guitar and piano but undercuts it with an ascending chorus of voices that toward the end of the song seems to morph into a slightly inhuman choir of Whoville residents.

Stevens also chooses to dredge up what may very well be one of the most bone-chillingly severe “Christmas songs” ever written. If Silent Night is the king of traditional Christmas music, “Coventry Carol” would be its headsman. Coventry Carol is an English song from the 16^th century that describes the biblical “Massacre of the Innocents” when King Herod ordered every male infant under the age of two to be killed because: Merry Christmas. The haunting Whoville chorus returns along with what I can only think to describe as a “singing saw murdering a Christmas tree.”

Stevens also covers the instrumental English Renaissance song “Go Nightly Cares,” credited to John Dowland, and ends the album with a relatively upbeat take on Auld Lang Syne (cue: return of Christmas saw here.)

These traditional carols are then juxtaposed with the four original songs written with the Dessners, starting with “Lumberjack Christmas/No One Can Save You From Christmases Past.” The song starts as an upbeat folk song with a sing-a-along of carolers (descending into a chorus of ho-ho-ho’s), festive fiddles and personal, slightly silly, lyrics balancing a jovial atmosphere with the tension lurking beneath the surface (“if drinking makes it easy/ the music’s kind of cheesy/the specials on the TV”). Halfway though, however, the song slows into an echo of voices singing that “no one can save you from Christmases past” while a “Christmas Theremin” seems to ring out a distress call and the lyric slyly changes to “no one can save you from Christmas” right before the song ends.

“The Midnight Clear” and “Carol of St. Benjamin the Bearded One” are two original songs that invoke traditional songs, “Upon a Midnight Clear” and “Carol of the Bells,” respectively, to further explore the clashing ideas of belief and doubt that seem inseparable from Stevens’ attempts to “understand” Christmas.”  In “The Midnight Clear” Stevens sings in the first verse: “I resign to petty things, like angels bending on their knees” before changing the lyric from petty to “glorious” things in the second verse. It’s a constant struggle between the head and the heart in determining whether any of the trappings of Christmas are actually significant, or if we just want them to be. Stevens pulls a similar trick in “Carol of St. Benjamin” when he starts with “In my heart and in my spirit, I concede, the things you want in life you have to really need” before changing the line in the second verse to “In my heart and in my spirit, I believe, the draft beneath the doorframe comes to challenge me.” There seems to be no easy answer to reconciling the common sense idea that none of this is really “necessary” with the inescapable feeling that we want to believe in this ephemeral, larger-than-life “spirit” of Christmas.

The last original song here is “Barcarola (You Must Be a Christmas Tree)” where if he hasn’t made it explicit yet, Stevens immediately lays out the problem in its clearest terms: “oh, no one else is happily, recklessly, asking for more than what they need/ I can’t say what I need…” Stevens goes on to speak to a second person, whose identity is not exactly clear, but seems to be a friend/love interest that the narrator has driven away, probably though greed and the personal struggles identified in this and other songs on the album. The song builds to a soaring conclusion with Sufjan and friends singing “you won’t be back again/ you said you needed me/ but I know you needed yourself to be cleaned of me.”

By the end of Gloria, the Christmas identity crisis is in full swing: to believe, yet to doubt, to anticipate, yet to feel guilt, to be obsessed with, yet to be embarrassed by. In other words: Christmas. Only 33 days left.