Gold is obviously more than a color, it’s one of the honorable gifts. (As demonstrated in Traveler’s “Gold Frankincense and Myrrh.” Rock the casbah, guys!) And it’s the composition of the five rings in that song (not about Hobbits, the other one). Of course there’s that other other song, by Burl Ives, which will also be dismissed. It’s no longer novelty if EVERYONE’s heard it, pretty as it may be. What we need here is an acknowledgement of the essence of gold for Christmas.
At least one, fairly recent, Christmas Carol musical adaptation (by Chris Blackwood; music by Piers Chater Robinson) mentions Scrooge’s “Heart of Gold,” but this song is specially ironical in that his past love, Belle, was hoping he had a nonpareil personality–not an avaricious soul.
Cledus T. Judd gets funky with his rapper alternate parodying ‘Two Front Teeth’ with “All I Want for Christmas is Two Gold Front Teef.” The message is all acquisition and fronting. Cledus really goes for it and i admire you if you can listen to the whole thing
I’d like to feature the grown up music posted by Patrick Higgins entitled “Golden Christmas.” It’s haunting cowboy alt rock and sends me into dreams of lazy, thoughtful Christmas basking. But i can’t tell if the legend is the name of the song, the band, or the artwork/theme. The vocals are background for the plinking and strumming and meld into mood. Beautiful, but vague.
I guess it’s best summed by The Starshine Singers–and i really want to imagine them as wholesome, not drug addled, children–with “Christmas Gold,” a metaphor for the thought of the gifts, not their remunerative values.