Random Thoughts* on John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)"

I listen to this song once a year - only once - on Christmas Day just as I'm waking up. Clichéd? Perhaps, but so's what the song's become. And it's a great song, one I put on par with "Imagine": a song so simple, so beautiful, so overplayed (not to mention overcovered (Celine Dion?)) that it's easy to forget how radical, how hopeful, how wonderful a song it is.

This song, like many of Lennon's best, shifts from the personal ("Merry Christmas John/ Merry Christmas Yoko") to the political ("and what have you done?") marvelously and effortlessly. There's John, soaked in reverb, there's Yoko, perfectly screechy, there's the children's choir, which in this song is somehow made unhackneyed.

I love this song, even if I can only listen to it this rarely without it growing stale. Happy Christmas, internet. Happy Christmas, friends. War is over! (If you want it.)
















*First in a pulse-pounding, page-turning series!