Last Christmas
Christmas for me is always intertwined with wonderful memories of my dad. As little girls, the bushy artificial tree was hauled out of storage along with all the decorations, a couple of weeks before Christmas . He, along with his two enthusiastic deputies, would hang every single decoration and bit of tinsel on the tree. There was no talk of restraint, as my mom indulgently let us display quite an overloaded tree, almost capsizing with a higgledy piggledy assortment of baubles, tinsel, angels, reindeer and more. She took over several years later, and we were quite amazed at how elegant a tree could look as opposed to our early enthusiastic decorating. And along with the season came Christmas music. All the usuals were played and my dad had a wide assortment of sacred and popular versions of carols - all of us doing a jig to Boney M's Christmas album! I also remember songs like "Do they know it's Christmas time" by Band Aid that only made sense to me years later. The cover with two little children from Africa looking very non-festive always made me wonder what they had to do with Christmas, the great melody overshadowing the bleak lyrics that I didn't understand at the time.
It was around the time when Band Aid released this single, that another "Christmas" song caught my dad's attention. At the festive celebrations in the Bangalore Club one evening he heard a song he fell in love with. He didn't find out the name immediately, going all over to shops and asking people about the song. He finally tracked down the DJ from that night and asked him what that song was. And then he got himself the album. It's rather embarrassing that I still have this song firmly on my playlist as it's probably one of the cheesiest songs in the world. But I think it was definitely worth the hunt across town some 30 years ago! Here it is...Wham's "Last Christmas" 
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