Indi’s alternative holiday playlist – 2018 – Preamble

Each year I put together a list of holiday-themed songs that nonbelievers can enjoy, to escape the mind-numbing repetition and over-the-top religiosity of standard holiday music.

For a more detailed explanation of what the list is about, and the criteria by which songs are chosen, you can check out the solicitation post. You can also check out last year’s list there.

This year the list is 100 songs, and 54 of them are entirely new to the list. To make the list more digestible, I’m going to break it into 10 posts of 10 songs each, which will go up one a day Monday to Friday over two weeks, starting tomorrow.

At the end, when all 10 posts and 100 songs have gone up, I will post a final summary of the entire list that will list all 100 songs, and provide some playlist files you can download. (The playlist files don’t actually include the songs themselves; they’re just lists of links to the songs on YouTube, SoundCloud, and other such places. Some media players can actually play them, but otherwise you can at least get the list of links to use in whatever way you please.)

Though the songs are numbered, it’s not really a ranking of how “good” the songs are. In fact, I’ve arranged things so that some days the post will be 10 all new songs, and others days it will be 10 songs that were featured on previous lists. Within each group of 10 I’ve also ordered the songs somewhat so that the group starts strong and ends on a high note. So if a song you really like “ranks lower” than a song you think is garbage, don’t panic. The numbers don’t really mean anything.

So, kick back, relax, and hopefully you’ll discover some cool new songs you can spin over the holidays!