Five weeks and five albums… if you’ve reached this point in the Sufjan Stevens yuletide voyage of self-discovery, you deserve a Christmas cookie. Here is the path we have traveled from Black Friday until today, Christmas Eve Eve Eve Eve:

Vol. 6 – Gloria

Vol. 7 – I Am Santa’s Helper

Vol. 8 – Christmas Infinity Voyage

Vol. 9 – Let it Snow!

Sufjan Stevens played at Asbury Hall on Tuesday and you can read all about that experience here, in Tom Dennis’ thorough and thoughtful review. During the show, Sufjan echoed many of the themes and sentiments we’ve been discussing here over the past four weeks, including what he referred to as his “bi-polar” obsession with Christmas, resulting in his extremely varied approach to holiday music. We’ve definitely seen Christmas music attacked from pretty much every angle possible on the first four albums of Silver & Gold, but like Stevens’ live show, everything thus far has just been an enormous build up to his final act: the Christmas Unicorn.

Vol. 10 – Christmas Unicorn, brings the total number of songs in the Sufjan Stevens Christmas music catalogue to an even 100. This final album acts a bit like a reminder as to all that has been accomplished through the other nine volumes before the series finally reaches its climactic conclusion and delivers the definitive Sufjan Stevens Christmas mission statement.

The album begins with a cover of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” that bursts into the room like it’s the Grand Marshall of a Christmas victory parade. The song is emblematic of the work Stevens did on Christmas Infinity Voyage (electronic flourishes, soaring vocals), which is appropriate as the sound of that album seemingly represented the pinnacle of Stevens’ acceptance and enjoyment of the holiday. The delirious, joyous delivery of this song’s message (putting the bad times behind you and celebrating) seems determined to convince you that having a “merry little” Christmas is not merely a suggestion. After this fervent opening, Stevens then re-visits many of the Christmas music tropes he established on his prior albums.

“Up on the Housetop” is yet another example of Stevens subverting a Christmas classic into something slightly less traditional and slightly more sinister. It’s also representative of his more recent efforts, in the generosity of the Christmas spirit, to share lead vocal duties, this time with his frequent collaborator, Vesper Stamper. The song also finds Stevens pulling another familiar trick, making his own lyrical contributions to a classic (“Up on the housetop/ spirit of the dead/ anyone particular/ everyone fed”) not just parroting the Christmas tradition, but building on it with subjective embellishments.

“We Need a Little Christmas” is the characteristic, exuberant sing-a-long on the album and it contains another message that more or less sums up the Sufjan Stevens Christmas philosophy. Under a rambunctious polka-beat and a crowd of carolers, the impact of the lyrics can still be felt rather heavily in the context of understanding that Stevens has been doing this for ten Christmases in a row now: “For I’ve grown a little leaner/ grown a little colder/ grown a little sadder/ grown a little older/ and I need a little angel/ sitting on my shoulder/ need a little Christmas now.” It’s an old show-tune sentiment that seems eerily apt for someone who’s been thinking about Christmas and recording songs for at least ten years before he finally decided to tour the country and start celebrating with his friends and fans.

Stevens also re-visits his “bi-polar” melancholic/optimistic feelings about the holiday on “Happy Karma Christmas” and pays his respects to the “Silent Night bracket” by interspersing three traditional carols throughout the album played in 45-second bursts on “Christmas fife,” another regular occurrence throughout the collection. This is all merely an opening act for the true star of the show, however.

The penultimate number on Songs for Christmas is “Justice Delivers Its Death” (also called "Silver & Gold" in the video above). The song is loosely based on the Burl Ives, Rudolph classic “Silver and Gold,” which gives the album its name. You might not recall Sam the Snowman singing these lyrics, however: “Oh I’m getting old/ Everyone wishes for youth/ How have I wasted my life/ Trusting the pleasure it gives here on earth?” Stevens takes the line: “How do you measure its worth/ just by the pleasure it gives here on earth?” and forces a reckoning of this rhetorical question that the original song failed to answer or even contemplate. The title of this compilation isn’t just homage to a classic carol, it’s a legitimate inquiry into how we can possibly appreciate something as vapid as the materialism of Christmas when the infinite threats of life and death are constantly hanging over our heads.

The answer to this concern is Sufjan Stevens’ Christmas thesis. It is the culmination of all that has come before it. The 100th song of his two Christmas box-sets. The finale of his live shows. The last stop on the Sufjan Stevens Christmas express. It is his Ebenezer Scrooge waking up on Christmas morning, a changed man, after witnessing his own, lonely death. It is his George Bailey running through the streets of Bedford Falls screaming “Merry Christmas movie house.” It is his “Grinch’s small heart grew three times that day.” It is Christmas Unicorn.

One of the most common attributes of the mythical “unicorn” (and my understanding comes largely from Peter S. Beagle’s excellent modern fantasy novel, The Last Unicorn) is their rarity. They are difficult to find. They are special. They are magical. They transcend beauty and reality and mortal understanding. In short, they are the perfect symbol for a Christmas character who is not easily seen, or described, or understood.  For someone who knows and loves all of the competing, disparate, aspects of Christmas in a way that seems logically impossible. For someone who sees Christmas as a gigantic pile of materialistic absurdity, which completely undercuts its original spirit, but loves that absurdity nonetheless due to the nostalgia and joy and feeling of unique surreality that it provides, which in turn, creates its own new, honest spirit that is connected and authentic and beautiful and miserable all at once, and somehow: it all makes sense. The majority of the song, Christmas Unicorn, is nothing other than Stevens simply describing the Christmas Unicorn himself and he espouses all of the above and more.

The lyrics read like a tornado swept through town and engulfed every potentially competing aspect of Christmas (the religious, the secular, the spiritual, the material, the traditional, the absurd), and mixed all of those elements together, turning them into the character profile of the Christmas Unicorn. He is all of it: Christmas warrior, Christian holiday, pagan heresy, unbelievable mythology, materialistic American, seasonal affective disorder, EVERYTHING. He is “the spirit of Christmas” in a way that no individual character (Jesus, Gabriel, Santa, Frosty, Rudolph, Christmas Tree, guy giving his wife a Lexus for Christmas in a commercial) could ever hope to be.

The introduction portion of the song ends with Stevens disclaiming that though “unicorns” are supposedly rare, he believes there are “others just like him” and that they are, in fact, “legions wide.” It seems to be this realization, that he is not alone, that many of us are actually Christmas Unicorns and might not even know it, that is the final star on the tree, embodied in the absolutely gut-punching, blissful musical moment that occurs at around the 6:27 mark.

This has seemingly been the entire point of this 100-song Christmas music endeavor: to deliver this message. To wake the Christmas Unicorn sleeper agents. To travel the country and celebrate with them in a costume made of balloon animals, ribbons and Christmas lights. To understand that we can be both self-aware of the negative aspects of Christmas yet earnestly revel in it without feeling guilty or ashamed. That we can blissfully stampede through fields of Christmas trees while simultaneously singing “I love you” and “love will tear us apart again” because it’s strange and beautiful and hypocritical and it’s everything at once and it’s bi-polar and it’s Christmas.

Merry Christmas everyone.

I am a Christmas Unicorn

In a uniform made of gold

With a billy goat beard and a sorcerer’s shield

And a mistletoe on my nose

Oh I am a Christian Holiday

I’m a symbol of original sin

I’ve a pagan tree and a magical wreath

And a bowtie on my chin

Oh I am a pagan heresy

I’m a tragical Catholic shrine

I’m a little bit shy with a lazy eye

And a penchant for sublime

Oh I am a mystical apostasy

I’m a horse with a fantasy twist

Though I play all night with my magical kite

People say I don’t exist

For I make no full apology

For the category I reside

I’m a mythical mess with a treasury chest

I’m a construct of your mind

Oh I am hysterically American

I’ve a credit card on my wrist

And I have no home or a field to roam

I will curse you with my kiss

Oh I am a criminal pathology

With a history of medical care

I’m a frantic shopper and a brave pill-popper

And they say my kind are rare

But I’ve seen others in the uniform

Of a unicorn just like me

We are legions wide and we choose no sides

We are masters of mystique

For you are a Christmas Unicorn

I have seen you on the beat

You may dress in the human uniform child

But I know you’re just like me

With only eleven days left until Christmas, and only four days left until the "Surfjohn Stevens Christmas Sing-A-Long: Seasonal Affective Disorder Yuletide Disaster Pageant on Ice" at Asbury Hall, we've reached the fourth week in our coverage of Sufjan Stevens' second 5-album Christmas compilation, Silver & Gold.

To quickly recap:

Sufjan Stevens really liked this thing called Christmas but couldn’t get his enthusiasm for it to agree with the vapid materialism that’s become the hallmark of the holiday. He spent some time trying to figure this out by breaking Christmas down, studying its roots, and building it back into something that harmonized the traditional with the modern.  By the end of his Christmas Infinity Voyage, it seemed as though Stevens had become significantly more comfortable with all of the complications presented by Christmas and might be ready to earnestly celebrate it again.

The fourth volume in the Silver & Gold compilation (and Stevens’ ninth Christmas album, overall) is called Let It Snow!, and for the most part, it really is nothing more than a straightforward celebration of the commonly understood present-day “spirit” of Christmas.

The album artwork has us back to relatively conservative territory (though there does seem to be something at least slightly sinister lurking under the faux-innocence of that mock-50’s shampoo advertisement). Musically, Stevens also pares things back from the experimentation of the last two albums (though some of the songs here do retain the electronic components of Christmas Infinity Voyage, indicating that they were recorded post-Christmas–epiphany). Overall, however, the nine songs on Let It Snow are upbeat and celebratory, seemingly a testament to having overcome the more negative aspects of the holiday.

The song choice here also reflects Stevens more fully embracing the secular idea of Christmas, as well as the modern notion of the “the Christmas season” and all that it entails. Almost all of the songs are either secular (“I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” “Santa Clause is Coming to Town,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas”) or are that peculiar brand of “Christmas” song that does not, explicitly, have anything to do with Christmas (“Sleigh Ride,” “Let It Snow”).

The album starts with “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” which seems appropriate given that we last saw Stevens floating in the heavens, as far from “home” as he could possibly be. With its dreamy, 3/4-waltz time signature, it actually sounds as if Stevens is slowly descending back toward Earth, ready to re-join family and friends, along with "snow, mistletoe and presents on the tree." Of course, the “big reveal” of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is that the narrator might only be able to experience these things in his own head, but one way or the other, imaginatively or actually, we’re going to start enjoying this damn holiday.

The album next launches into a bright and bouncy version of what I had previously deemed the “king” of secular Christmas carols, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” I don’t think there is a single other song that so succinctly and powerfully (and threateningly!) states the mission-statement of the modern, non-religious Christmas holiday. Santa’s coming. This isn’t a joke. He knows what’s up, he knows whether you’ve been behaving, and here’s the bottom line: Good = presents. Bad = nothing. Get your shit together or Christmas is going to suck. It’s a pretty ominous message that is consistently belied by the fact that the melody to the song is basically the epitome of the “merry” in Christmas.

Stevens does subvert this a bit, however, by adding an outro to the song that more accurately reflects its true essence. While slowing down the tempo and scaling back the instrumentation, Sufjan and friends sing: “Watch what you’re doing/ always improving/ he keeps his eyes on the prize/ of your spirit/ He’s in the window/ gathering info/ he keeps his eyes on the prize/ of your person.” As my girlfriend has pointed out to me: this song could just as easily be about a serial killer. This seems to indicate that although Stevens is back among the living when it comes to celebrating Christmas, he hasn’t fully abandoned his former self-awareness. In fact, it seems that his ability to be skeptical of what Christmas has become, yet revel in it despite of that, has led to his increased enjoyment of the holiday.

Stevens goes on to embrace the best of the secular and the seasonal with recordings of “Sleigh Ride” (possibly one of the most thoroughly covered Christmas songs of all time) and “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” the Johnny Marks song best known for being sung during the celebratory conclusion of the Rankin-Bass Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. While the takes on these classics are optimistic and joyful, Stevens continues to acknowledge his latent apprehensions about Christmas, though perhaps not with the imminent dread that he previously had.

A cover of “Let It Snow” is barely even recognizable as Stevens slows it down, switches it to a minor key and sings it in a near-whisper as if he’s trying not to wake some terrible beast. If you listen to the way he sings “let it snow” with nothing but haunting acoustic guitar accompaniment, a sparse bass drum, and a choir of voices that sounds like its being made to sing at gun-point, then look at that cheery cover of the Let It Snow! album again, it’s certainly easy to see those words in a different light. Stevens might be back to fully endorsing Christmas but he’s not about to do so at the cost of reminding you every once and awhile that this holiday still has the ability to evoke some darkness.

The only Stevens original composition here is called “X-Mas Spirit Catcher,” a song that plays on the idea of “catching” the very “spirit” of Christmas. “The spirit went where it went/ though it could not see forgiveness/ and when it came to pass again, enterprising in its legend/ the government did all it could, to be sure its power was given.” Stevens seems to be describing the link between “the spirit of Christmas” surrounding the original Christian mythology with the harnessing of that spirit by contemporary society for potentially unrelated purposes. Stevens’ appreciation for this link and that, perhaps, the “spirit” of Christmas is the same no matter what’s been done to it, is emblematic of his more recent work on these themes.

The album is rounded out with three songs sung by persons that are not Sufjan Stevens. Spreading the vocal workload around seems to be indicative of Stevens’ further efforts to join in the communal aspects of Christmas, which is further realized in the “Sing-A-Long” parts of his albums and live shows. Cat Martino writes and sings a song called “The Sleigh in the Moon” (an eerie, pretty song paying homage to the child-like wonder of waiting for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve) and sings a cover of “Ave Maria” (an eerie, pretty song paying homage to the child-like wonder of Jesus’ mom). Sebastian Kreuger ends the album with a 40-second song that he wrote called “Christmas Face,” where he sings: “though I try to find my own way/ to make your Christmas face, your Christmas face/ your holly hair and tinsel eyes/ my efforts will disgrace.”

Basically, Christmas isn’t perfect. It seems once we’ve finally stopped treating it as some unachievable ideal and accepted that, it might even become fun again.

Musically, things have changed a bit from Stevens’ previous material. The final three volumes of Silver & Gold were recorded during and after the Sufjan Stevens musical revolution, which saw him adopt a significantly more electronic sound leading up to the 2010 releases of All Delighted People and The Age of Adz. This transformation saw Stevens adding a myriad of synthesized sounds and auto-tuned vocals to his more traditional folk instrumentation and the Christmas music he produced after this turning point is no exception. This journey into more unfamiliar musical territory for Stevens is reflected in the spirit of Volume 8, Christmas Infinity Voyage.

The instrumental experimentation on this album finds Stevens launching into the heavens with soaring electronics, spacey synthesizers and otherworldly vocals. This musical outlet seems to have been exactly what Stevens needed at this point in his Christmas comprehension quest. By pushing the sound of his music into the cosmos and away from the human anxieties of Earth, he has seemingly been afforded the opportunity to become unburdened by the mundane and the secular. He now floats freely, distantly, above it all, with the fresh vantage point of the same celestial beings that may have witnessed the first Christmas. This change in musical direction mirrors a change in Stevens’ opinion on Christmas itself. This voyage into “infinity” seems to have set him on the path toward understanding the point of it all.

There are basically two different, interweaving, stories being told on this album. The first is through a series of songs (all from the traditional “Silent Night bracket”) that are almost exclusively concerned with heavenly entities spreading the word about the birth of the Christian savior. Stevens plays these songs as if he’s right there among the stars and angels, perhaps, counter-intuitively, getting back to the original spirit of Christmas by sending it into outer space. The underlying plot thread then finds Stevens descending altitude slightly and sharing his feelings of contentment about his newfound Christmas enlightenment.

The album starts with a complete re-working of the 19^th century carol, “Angels We Have Heard on High.” Stevens jettisons the original melody and lyrics as the traditional chorus beings with “angels we have heard on high” and Stevens answers by radioing in from the distance: “singing for the earth’s attention.” He goes on to trade lines with the chorus (presumably from the pilot’s chair of his Christmas Gundam Robot) like some Yuletide Bowie in Space: Chorus of Angels – “Shepherds, why this jubilee?” Stevens - “Have you seen the flying saucer?” Though it seems Stevens has only unwittingly found himself here, scarcely believing what to his wondering eyes should appear, he soon joins in the chorus of “glorias” and seems to find some comfort in the ethereal space of the heavens. After the second chorus, Stevens breaks out the big guns, seemingly fiddling with the control panel of his Christmas spaceship, as we get a taste of the bass-heavy synthesized sound that will dominate the rest of the album.

We next hear Stevens fully embracing his role as a member of the heavenly multitudes. Voice awash in auto-tune, having fully converted to electronic instrumentation, he continues the story of the angels delivering the message of Christ’s birth on “Do You See What I See?” It’s a song that explains how the news travels from the “night wind” to a “little lamb” to a “shepherd boy” to a “mighty king” to the “people everywhere.” As the information spreads, the messengers ask each other whether they “see,” “hear,” and “know” the same things now that this, presumably, unifying event has occurred. After the traditional lyrics have run their course, Stevens takes this a step further, deviating from script, and asking “do you feel what I feel now?” in a five minute outro that repeats the sentiment again, and again, in order to thoroughly drive home the point that this is really what is on his mind. Forget “seeing” and “hearing” and “knowing”… can you “feel” this? Stevens warbles through the line over and over through layers of auto-tune that make it sound as if his consciousness has become grafted into the mainframe of his Christmas shuttle.

“Christmas in the Room” comes next but first we’ll cover the improbable five-song run that leads to the album's finale.

First, we get a 48-second instrumental version of “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,” with a melody that sounds like its being played on a light-sabre, before a computerized voice stoically announces “Merry Christmas” and Stevens launches into another heavily amended version of a traditional carol, “Good King Wenceslas.” Here it sounds like Stevens has taken a detour to a Christmas space station on the moon, denizens yelling, “Hey, it’s Christmas!” upon his arrival. Stevens informs them of the good deeds of Saint Wenceslas before the song, inexplicably, seamlessly transitions into a cover of Prince’s “Alphabet Street.” (The album humorously credits the song to “His Majesty Prince.”) It’s difficult to even begin explaining the thought-process here (assuming there even was one) but the least we might be able to say is that given how surprisingly natural this sounds, it might just be a testament to how comfortable Stevens is becoming with his new outlook on Christmas. It’s no longer a confusing, shameful, marathon of second-guessing. It’s perfectly fine to mix Good King Wenceslas with Good Prince Rogers Nelson. Christmas should sound however you want it to sound.



Alphabet Street transitions into a one-minute Stevens original instrumental composition called “Particle Physics,” (that sounds exactly how you would expect) before finishing up with a take on “Joy to the World.” This is a song that Stevens covered on Songs for Christmas and his change of perspective in the mean time is evident. This is yet one more traditional song on this album, announcing the birth of Christ, that Stevens has morphed into an electronic Christmas celebration. The song spirals out of control as he interpolates lyrics from the Age of Adz song, “Impossible Soul” (“boy, we can do much more together”) and reprises “do you see what I see?” before it sputters to a conclusion, the heavenly message thoroughly delivered and the Christmas Gundam out of gas.

There are two original songs here that Stevens doesn’t play “in character” for the album. The first is the aforementioned “Christmas in the Room.” It’s a relatively straight-forward song that serves as a window into the development of Stevens’ Christmas philosophy mid-infinity-voyage. The idea is basically to take Christmas and make it as small and personal as possible with the person you love; literally reducing it to the very “room” that the two of you are in. It’s an incredibly mature sentiment for someone who used to have such difficulty figuring out how to actually enjoy this holiday. (The song also includes one of the smartest, affecting melodies on the entire compilation when Stevens sings: “oh I can see the day when we’ll die/ but I don’t care to think of silence.”)

The album ends with “The Child With the Star on His Head,” a 15-minute epic that indicates that Stevens really has found some peace with Christmas. He finally seems able to harmonize his appreciation for the tradition (“the child with the star on his head”), with the secular spirit of holiday (“I am calling you close to my table, where I have made a us a feast”), with his acceptance of his inability to change the less savory commercialized aspects of Christmas (“in small ideas, in engineering, the world of sports and second best.”) He finishes the album by celebrating this epiphany with a ten-minute electronic noise jam, the same experimental soundscape that helped him reach his newfound understanding in the first place. To Christmas infinity and beyond.

Throughout this holiday season we’ll be looking at each of the five albums in Sufjan Stevens’ latest Christmas compilation: Silver & Gold.  If you missed the first entry: Vol. 6, Gloria, you can read it here. The Surfjohn Stevens Christmas Sing-A-Long: Seasonal Affective Disorder Yuletide Disaster Pageant on Ice is currently making its way across the country (see, Philadelphia, Oxford), (is looking pretty reasonable!) and will be arriving in Buffalo on December 18.

The second installment in Silver & Gold is called I Am Santa’s Helper and things have changed a bit since we’ve taken Gloria off the turntable. While Gloria did explore some of the darker aspects of “the Christmas problem,” musically it remained relatively restrained with tasteful versions of traditional carols and the Dessner brothers overseeing the original material with the urgent, yet refined, dichotomy that guides most National songs. Regardless, it did appear as though there was some fairly serious Christmas tension lurking beneath the surface and that tension has escaped and turned into a 23-song Christmas-nightmare-mania-train called I Am Santa’s Helper.

That’s the album artwork.

Up until this point, Stevens had been billing the Christmas EPs as “Sufjan Stevens and Friends,” paying homage to the relatively innocent-sounding sing-a-long fashion of the albums. We now get: “Sufjam (sic) Stevens and his Unwitting Cohorts” presenting I Am Santa’s Helper, written in comic book typeface dripping with (I guess it pretty much has to be) blood, with a creepy hand-drawn woman staring off-screen and the seeming acknowledgment of the superfluity of “even more songs for” Christmas. And “even more songs” there certainly are.

There are 23 songs on this album. Only two of them are over three minutes long. Sixteen of them are under two minutes. It’s a frantic whirlwind of notes, sounds, and singing that seems to have been born for no other reason than to accomplish the opposite of the residents of Halloweentown and “un-make” Christmas. As we saw on Gloria, and as we can see all around us, the thing that Christmas has turned into can be overwhelming and complicated. One way to get over this might be to strip Christmas down to its individual parts and examine it, bare-boned, simplified (and sometimes, rather ugly).

From 2006 to 2007, Stevens began to migrate away from the folk-pop leanings of the Michigan-Illinois era and began working on the experimental, classical composition, The BQE. The songs on I Am Santa’s Helper were written around the time that The BQE was first performed and Stevens’ renewed interest in classical music is readily apparent.

Thirteen of the 23 songs on the album are classical and traditional songs, mostly from the 18^th and 19^th centuries, mostly by English and German composers, and many of which are entirely instrumental. Most of these songs are not even “Christmas carols,” but are hymns concerning Christianity in general. As such, when these songs do include vocals they are usually only simple church-choir refrains covering the usual church-choir refrain territory (see: Jesus).  Other than a few pieces by Bach, there are only three songs that would likely even be recognizable to listeners of average musical acumen: “Jingle Bells,” “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” (None of these three standards are longer than two minutes, all appear to have been recorded in one take, and all sound like they’re practically drowning in alcohol. These might give you the best idea of what to expect during the “sing-a-long” portion of the live show, however.)

Stevens does also play what seems to be “Maoz Tzur” (a traditional Hanukkah song) on a piano for 42 seconds, which would be 42 seconds longer than Stevens has devoted to any December-holiday other than Christmas in his 99 other holiday recordings. There doesn’t seem to be any explanation for this other than that the manic I Am Santa’s Helper whirlwind grew to such breadth that it simply began sucking in snippets of songs from nearby holidays.

In addition to these various covers, we have ten original songs on the album. Five of these are instrumentals that are significantly less conventional than the traditional fare on the album and have far more Sufjan Stevens-esque titles. (“Mysteries of the Christmas Mist,” “Behold! The Birth of Man, the Face of Glory,” “Make Haste to See the Baby,” “Eternal Happiness or Woe,” [and my favorite] “Even the Earth Will Parish and the Universe Will Give Way.”) This leaves us with five original songs, with lyrics, that have the potential to describe what is actually happening here.

The second song on the album is “Christmas Woman.” It is the longest song here, by a good distance, the most fully realized, and as the song that more or less begins the album, perhaps gives us some indication of what to expect. As stated previously, it might be appropriate to look at I Am Santa’s Helper as Stevens attempts to deconstruct Christmas. In this sense, "Christmas Woman" happily buzzes and whirs with tooting horns and jingling bells, as if it’s the soundtrack to Santa’s workshop; until a minute and a half into the song, a chorus of elves chimes in to let you know that they’re not making toys, they’re taking them apart. “I know, for a century, we were scrambling to assemble what a man believes/ I know, for a time I’ve led, to believe that human kindness would prevail instead.” Four minutes in, the song retreats to percussion and Stevens finally enters the track with solo vocals, “oh I was thinking, by myself, I was remembering every moment, by the river, when it froze last night.” I’m really not sure what else to take away from this other than that the self-reflection Polar Express is ready to pull out of the station with Stevens as “Santa’s Helper,” conducting the train and tossing deconstructed two-minute gifts to listeners over the next half hour.

The remaining original songs on the album all follow the pattern of reducing Christmas to its most absurd, broken down parts. “Happy Family Christmas” starts out sounding relatively normal before descending into lo-fi ramshackle drunkenness. “Ding-a-Ling-a-Ring-a-Ling” features a screeching electric guitar and a children’s chorus that sings (I kid you not): “Ring-a-ling-a-ling/ Ding-a-ling-a-ding-ling-a-ring-a-ling/ Baby Jesus is the king, Jesus is the king-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling.”

“Mr. Frosty Man” picks up the baton with abrasive guitars, a stilted rhythm section, and the following lyrics: “It’s time to tango with the frisky frosty Frosty Man,” “He likes ice cream and Yo La Tango with the jammin’ pants,” “He’s got a friend called Coolio, Vanilla Ice, and Ice-Cube,” “Mr. Frosty, don’t be bossy, winter’s coming soon, and when it snows again, frosty!” There’s really not much more to say about this that the excellent Claymation video that was released for this song cannot fully explain.

The album ends with “I Am Santa’s Helper,” and the Christmas Identity Crisis Express seemingly pulling back into the station with a chorus repeatedly singing, “I am Santa’s helper, you are Santa’s slave.” The idea seems to be that this strange dissection of Christmas music was actually necessary in order to “help” Christmas. Rather than blindly following Christmas with no self-awareness as to what it is that one’s doing and why, Stevens might have thought it necessary to break it down into simple, understandable parts, to trace its origins and render it absurd, in order to truly fathom and appreciate it. Then, maybe, Christmas can be put back together again: better, snowier, happier.

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.