The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #217

#217: "The Christmas Song" (2004) - The Raveonettes

Christmas comes early at the Atomic Blawg this week, as I've listened to your pleading (to the tunes of over one-hundred e-mails and messages a week for the past month) to give you a hint as to at least one song that's in my top forty somewhere. Well, here it is. It's "The Christmas Song" by that Danish duo the Ravonettes (but more about them later on in the chart--much later on). Originally, this record--the best Christmas pop song I've heard in the past ten years--was slated in my top forty (though I won't tell you where), but as a special Christmas bonus, I've decided to let you open just one present early by bumping this one down 175 notches or so, just so that this Christmas, we can all sing and remember the time(s) when the one(s) we loved were not with us when we wanted and missed them the most. This song is for you, and it's for them, and the Raveonettes have covered it for us in the monochromatic wrapping paper that Phil Spector gave them a few years ago, and they tied some reverb in with the sleigh bell bows, and they sing with typical reserve to underscore the lonliness in the lyric, and then they turned out the lights in the house, so that the lights from the Tannenbaum would remind us of the fading stars in our memories where some of our lost loved ones still linger.

So...what are you waiting for? Here's your present? Open it!