By Kate Lillie
Originally published on Global Comment
Dean Martin’s Let It Snow is a Christmas classic for all the right reasons. It has a nice pace and beautiful instrumental flourishes and best of all, it’s easy to sing along to (even I can hit most of the notes, and despite the fact I love singing along to everything, I am most definitely not a talented singer. At all). Martin himself sang various holiday songs but this is probably his best-known; others included the popular-but-slightly-creepy Baby It’s Cold Outside (forget Blurred Lines, this song has very uncomfortable lyrics) as well as White Christmas and lots of the other standards of the time.
Written in 1945 and inspired by a heatwave, it was recorded by Martin in 1959 and included on his album A Winter Romance. The cover art of the album seems to hint at two winter romances; Wikipedia’s writers were obviously in an erudite mood when they wrote this entry: “The original artwork featured a picture of Martin embracing a fetching young woman. At the same time, he is throwing a passing flirt at a second, attractive woman.” Well, they do say that Christmas is a good season for flirting so perhaps we should all go out and throw some passing flirts at fetching strangers tomorrow – maybe the world will be a happier place for it.
Now, without wishing to put too much of a dampener on things, Dean Martin actually died on Christmas Day, although happily only after living a long and very full life with his friends in the Rat Pack (and not being sent to prison for murder a la Phil Spector). So in a way I feel like this makes his Christmas song even more poignant. So if you do decide to throw out a passing flirt at a fetching stranger tomorrow, do it for Dean – somehow I can’t help but think he’d approve. After all, everybody loves somebody sometime, right?
