'To have it come around during this special time of year is pure joy.'

December 23, 2022 9:19 AM

An oral history of Run-DMC's 'Christmas in Hollis'
posted by box (8 comments total)

Aww, this was lovely. I just rewatched Die Hard yesterday and I love that these two pieces of art that at the time were, for various reasons, questionably ever going to be part of the Christmas canon, interact explicitly in the text of the second one. Die Hard is such a deliciously self-aware movie with such a smart racial consciousness and putting Christmas in Hollis in the opening minutes sets the tone as no other song could've.
posted by potrzebie at 10:10 AM on December 23, 2022

Clarence Carter's Back Door Santa, the main sample that "Christmas in Hollis" is built around, is a classic of the "horny Santa" subgenre of Christmas songs. Another in that style is Santa Claus Wants Some Loving, which is really about how Dad wants to finish fixing the bike the kid's getting for Christmas before his wife is too sleepy to get busy. I never thought about it that deeply before, but Santa Claus Wants Some Loving gained new resonance for me with DMC's soundbite:

Ever since kindergarten, my mother and father made it clear they were Santa Claus. They worked hard all year to provide us with presents and no way some fat white man was getting the credit.
posted by jonp72 at 12:19 PM on December 23, 2022 [9 favorites]

DMC: We typically wrote our rhymes separately, which worked so well on “Christmas in Hollis” because we went in totally different directions. Run told this crazy story about Santa Claus in our neighborhood park and I told the story of what the holidays were actually all about growing up in my house. Christmas had a magical mystical quality to it but more of a Jimmy Stewart It’s A Wonderful Life way than “Ho, Ho, Ho.” Ever since kindergarten, my mother and father made it clear they were Santa Claus. They worked hard all year to provide us with presents and no way some fat white man was getting the credit. Run’s is fantasy, mine is reality.

Love it.
posted by euphorb at 12:59 PM on December 23, 2022 [4 favorites]

Another holiday banger is their follow-up festive delight Christmas Is
posted by Kattullus at 1:00 PM on December 23, 2022

I love this:

Shriver: Jimmy and I never asked the artists, “Do you want to help the Special Olympics?” Jimmy would suggest to them, You should do this holiday classic because it matches your voice and energy and won’t that be fun? So if they recorded a song and that was the extent of their involvement, that was totally fine. Run-DMC was a different story. They performed at multiple Special Olympics events and took their responsibility and success seriously. Run-DMC wanted to do right by the community they grew up in, so they’re out there doing “Christmas in Hollis” at a sweltering July event in Queens. It wasn’t exactly the Met Gala, it’s kids running around a track, but the Special Olympians absolutely loved them for it. It says a lot about who these guys are. 

posted by eckeric at 2:33 PM on December 23, 2022 [12 favorites]

1. I loved this article.
2. I loved just about everything I read on Defector this year - from both their staff, and their excellent selection of freelancer submissions.
3. I would like help them get the word out that Defector are now accepting applications for their Summer 2023 internship program. 10 week job, pays $20/hour. Their last (and first, so far) intern Kathryn Xu wrote some of my favorite blogs I read this year. Please get the word out to any budding journalists and writers in your life.
posted by Anoplura at 6:17 PM on December 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

“It’s Christmas time in Hollis, Queens/Mama’s cookin’ chicken and collard greens” is an absolute banger of a line, not just the line itself but the delivery. DMC’s hammer-pounding voice hitting every syllable like Shohei Ohtani hits a baseball, the beat laid down behind it, it’s just so perfect.
posted by azpenguin at 8:02 PM on December 23, 2022 [3 favorites]

Another data point for the ubiquity of Christmas in Hollis: There’s a Christmas Eve concert every year on the main television channel of YLE, which is the Finnish equivalent of the BBC. This year they had someone covering Christmas in Hollis.
posted by Kattullus at 4:01 AM on December 24, 2022