December 20 - Christmas in July

The thing most people probably never realize about Christmas music is that it's almost never recorded during the Christmas season. Most of it's recorded during the summertime so they'll have time to tinker with the levels and get the mix right and package it and ship it in time for Christmas and everything else.
And so to deal with this, sometimes you'll get a singer or producer or whoever who wants to create a Christmasy atmosphere in the studio for the recording session. They'll string up lights in the studio, put Rudolph on the TV, wear Santa hats, shit like that. The best idea I heard was when Chuck Berry was cutting Run, Run, Rudolph, they brought in an oven and baked a bunch of gingerbread cookies so the whole place would smell like Christmas.
But my favorite was when (country recording stars) The Turner Sisters came in one July to cut There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays.
The plan was to cook a whole Christmas dinner for everybody right there in the studio's kitchenette: turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie, the whole bit. Even eggnog. They had to bring in an extra fridge to put all the food in, particularly the 20 pound turkey they'd picked up from a farm over in Backgate, Arkansas.
Problem was the extra fridge caused a power overload in the middle of the night, the studio blew a fuse, and by the time we got there the following Monday, the turkey was beyond bad. And with that, there went Christmas dinner.
But The Turner Sisters had already booked the studio, and so, being the professionals they were, they made the best of it.
The food, as I said, wasn't happening. In fact, pretty much the only thing that was salvageable was the bourbon for the egg nog, so everybody just stuck with that. And so there we were at ten in the morning, everybody doing shots of bourbon mixed with nondairy creamer and calling them nogcycles.
Well, after a couple of hours of this--I don't know if I would call it Christmas spirit, but there was definitely some sort of merriment going on around the studio--everybody was feeling it. They were crumpling up paper and having "snowball fights." Ginger Turner made a tissue angel in the ladies' bathroom. And for some reason, Tom, Ray, and Sanders, the male back up singers, were going around the studio with bags over their heads and trick or treating. All of which, I'll admit, doesn't sound too debauched by today's standards, but for a Monday morning in July in mid-60s Tennessee, it wasn't too bad.
Anyway, by about three o clock, everybody was good and loaded, and suddenly somebody remembered we were supposed to be cutting a record. And by the time we got everybody herded into the studio, it was impossible to get anybody to take it seriously. They kept singing in different cartoon voices, changing the words, laughing hysterically during takes, you name it.
I still can't believe we ever got everybody in the right frame of being to cut the damn record, but we did and it was a keeper--except for one part right smack dab in the middle that we absolutely meant to edit out and replace but we just never did. And to this day, I still don't know how we let it slip by, but we did. I'm guessing it had something to do with the bourbon.
Anyway, my point is The Turner Sisters' little ad lib was never snipped out. It made it all the way onto the record, and if you get your hands on a copy you'll hear it.
In the original, the words go, "I met a man who lived in Tennessee, he was heading for Pennsylvania and some homemade pumpkin pie (some pumpkin pie (that's the back up singers))." But when The Turner Sisters did it that day, it came out like this: "I met a man who lived in Tennessee, he was heading for Pennsylvania and some homemade fucking pie (some fucking pie)."
The funniest part is how few people notice it. If you're not listening for it, it's easy to miss. But it's there, plain as day. "Pennsylvania and some homemade fucking pie."
When we cracked open the box of records and put one on a couple months later, you should have seen our jaws hit the floor. We'd completely forgotten about it up until then! There we were listening to the damn thing in the office of the president of the record company--and he didn't notice a thing! So we sure as hell didn't point it out. We just quietly went about the holiday season, always kind of wincing in anticipation of somebody discovering our little R-rated lyric. But nobody ever said anything.
To this day, it's still one of my favorite Christmas records. And every time I partake in some bourbon, particularly around the holidays, I can't help but smile as I think to myself how nice it would be to have a nice slice of homemade fucking pie to go along with it.