Introducing: Jingle Bell Jawns!/JBJ #1: 'A Partridge Family Christmas Card'

I have a strict rule about Christmas music. While I love the genre — and make no mistake, "Christmas music” is a genre that just happens to encompass most other genres — I don’t start listening to holiday tunes until the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday. (Or, as I like to call it, “Frank Black Friday”. Details on Frank Black Friday to follow.)

Just an hour ago, Elvis Costello & the Attractions were jingling my bells with their incendiary This Year’s Model album. Now, though, I find myself breaking my own rule, as I spin A Partridge Family Christmas Card, the biggest selling holiday album of the 1971 season.

I guess you could say I’ve been inspired. It all started early this afternoon, when I scanned my car radio dial, curious to see if any station had launched their holiday programs. Sure enough, a Delaware station, WJBR (99.5 on your FM dial in these parts), is now all-Christmas all the time. In the short time I was listening, I’ve already heard Johnny Mathis, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and the inevitable Mariah Carey. I even got sent to Whamvahla with Wham!’s timeless classic, “Last Christmas”.

Soon after hearing these tunes in the car, I stopped at my friend Shawn’s Forever Changes record and gift shop, right here in Phoenixville. He gave me a sneak peek at the Christmas records that will soon be hitting his shelves, and I used three RichBux (the money that accrues from the sale of notebooks that I make and sell in his shop, as well as my contributions to FC’s delightful dollar bins) to bring home the Partridge Family album that I’m currently using to break my own Christmas music rule.

As if that wasn’t enough, Mike and Angela then dropped the brand new “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas” episode of their thoroughly entertaining A Podcast for Christmas. That sent me over the edge and now I’m playing the Partridges and not nearly as mad about it as I thought I’d be.

Mike and Angela and their special guests had an insightful discussion of holiday music, which particularly touched on the role of nostalgia on determining the Christmas music you love. They also discussed something that I think might be a more recent phenomena, but I could be wrong: the idea that most people don’t really have a favorite Christmas album, just a bunch of random favorite holiday tunes. I would dispute that, but that could just be my experience.

With all this in mind, I’ve decided that tonight I will launch a series of seasonal entries called “Jingle Bell Jawns” on this website. Each entry will explore a different Christmas vinyl album or CD in my collection. Generally, I’ll be using my special Mystical Dice of Random Holiday Musical Destiny to decide what albums I’ll be covering each day. Tonight though, I’ll start out deliberately, by discussing my newfound Partridge Family Christmas album. The following will inform you all about this fine holiday record, and will give you an idea of what future “Jingle Bell Jawns” entries will look like.

[Note: unlike a certain personal injury lawyer gracing billboards around the city, I have spent my entire life living just outside Philadelphia and am therefore nearly as eligible to use the word jawn as either Meek Mill is or William Penn would be if he was still with us.]

Each Jingle Bell Jawn entry will follow the template shown below. I’ll provide the pertinent album info and how I came to acquire my current copy, if I know. I will note whether the album contains a version of “Jingle Bells” because that seems important. I’ll discuss the album’s history, and what it means to me. I will offer highlights, lowlights and oddities; and finally I’ll rate the album on two separate scales: one based strictly on musical basis and one based on my own emotional resonance to the record.

As these entries go on, I may be prompted to add other sections, but let’s not get crazy, OK?

Jingle Bell Jawn #1: A Partridge Family Christmas Card — The Partridge Family (November 1971, Bell Records).

How Did I Acquire This Album? As mentioned above, I bought this copy today at Forever Changes. It cost me three RichBux.

Does This Album Include a Version of “Jingle Bells”? Yes.

What’s The Story on This Album? The Partridge Family sitcom, starring Shirley Jones and David Cassidy made its television debut on September 25, 1970 and became a sensation. The show was so successful that it spawned a recording career for the family, though on record the Partridges were Shirley and David and some crack studio pros; the rest of the brood did not participate. By the time this Christmas album was released the Partridges had launched three albums to the Top 10 of Billboard’s Top LP chart.

Original pressings of the album included the “Seasons Greetings” card in the red envelope that you can see in the photo above. If the copy at Forever Changes did not include the titular card, I probably wouldn’t have bought it.

The Partridge Family Christmas Card was a huge hit at the time. It sat comfortably at #1 for all four weeks that Billboard’s special Top Christmas Albums chart existed during the ‘71 holiday season. Despite that success, the album seems to have become a bit of a curio today. If you know, you know, but generally, it seems like most people don’t know about A Partridge Family Christmas Card.

What Does This Album Mean to Me? As my emotional resonance rating will indicate, A Partridge Family Christmas Card means the world to me. I do not know exactly what prompted my mom to buy the album, presumably within weeks of its release in 1971, though it’s not surprising that she bought it. My memories are dim, but our Friday evenings that year would have been spent watching the one-two punch of The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch. But Mom didn’t go out of her way to pick up 1970’s Merry Christmas with the Brady Bunch (to this day, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an original copy of that album).

I also do not know where Mom bought the album, and that is a fact I wish I did know. 69th Street in Upper Darby? One of the center city Philly record shops? A local Delco store? I’ll never know and I’ll always wonder.

Once Mom acquired A Partridge Family Christmas Card, it entered our family’s regular rotation of Christmas music and has essentially never left. I had the original album that Mom bought up until last year, at which time I returned it to my sister Lisa when we gave her a record player for Christmas.

Highlights: “My Christmas Card to You”, the only new original song on the album, deserves to be a holiday standard. Most of the holiday classics that comprise the rest of the album are enjoyably upbeat or mellow, within the early 1970s pop rock sound, as needed.

Lowlights: None, really, unless you have deep-seated feelings about “Frosty the Snowman” (see Oddities, below).

Oddities: The somnambulant “Frosty the Snowman” was daring pre-teens of 1971 to explore the deep existential meaning of “now before I melt away,” and continues to do so for anyone who happens to hear it. Carpe diem, people! Having lived with the Partridge album since I was six years old, I had become immune to their bummed-out “Frosty” until my wife Donna heard us playing the record and immediately remarked that this was not your typical jaunty snowman song.

How Do I Rate This Album, in Strictly Musical Terms, on a Scale of 1 to 5 Jingle Bells? 3.5 Jingle Bells. This is a warm, cozy holiday record, though it may be of limited interest to people who did not exist in 1971.

How Do I Rate This Album, in Personal Emotional Resonance, on a Scale of 1 to 5 Partridges in a Pear Tree? 6 Partridges out of a possible 5. Off the charts emotional resonance, for me anyway.