It's Not Christmas To Me

until I hear Callie Crossley and Mike Wilkens go over his annual collection of wacky Christmas songs. 

Mike’s Merry Mix 2025: A year of wacky and wonderful holiday music

Every year since 1989, Mike Wilkins has been digging through archives, compilations, vinyls, B-sides, cassettes, CDs and the world of digital music to put together his annual collection of underground holiday tunes.

Then Wilkins, engineer for PRX and GBH’s The World, puts together his “mixtape” — now a playlist. It features new takes on beloved classics, quirky original songs and some selections listeners would deem bizarre at best. But Wilkins said when it comes to holiday music, some artists take big swings to see what could be the next “All I Want For Christmas Is You” or, perhaps more likely, “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer.”

“There are some people who are just like, ‘How wacky can we make it? Let’s veer from the norm a little bit.’ While others still take traditional routes. But I think — when you’re a creative, when you are a songwriter — you probably want to push the envelope a little,” Wilkins told Callie Crossley on GBH’s Under the Radar.

This year’s edition includes plenty of off-the-wall songs, like the promotional track “Charlie, The Christmas Chimpanzee” by Alice Martin, “Lucifer’s Christmas” by Glasgow artist Dale McPhail and “Zoomah, The Santa Claus From Mars” by Brookline’s own Barry Gordon. Gordon, a child star who already had a Christmas hit with his 6-year-old vocals on “Nuttin’ For Christmas,” went on to become an actor and the longest-serving president of the Screen Actors Guild.

For me it's not listening to the atrocities that he finds or rediscovers on the B-sides of his extensive collection, it's the enormous pleasure of listening to Callie Crossley and him going over it.  Most of them play about as much of them as I care to hear.  Though some of them are so bad that they're worth hearing the entirety of, especially the ones that don't seem to have been created tongue in cheek.