Perhaps to my children’s disappointment, I’m a pretty moderate consumer of Christmas. Yes, I hate some of it (any unsolicited elves, shelves, or other methods of seasonal behavior modification burn at my threshold) and love some of it beyond reason (…cookies), but taken together they achieve a proper homeostasis, in my opinion.
So before I recommend this holiday album, understand that I’m not coming at you as a connoisseur of Christmas music. I’m not blasting Mariah Carey as soon as the trick-or-treaters leave or keeping tabs on the Hallmark Channel’s contribution to the Great American Songbook. I’m not a connoisseur of any music, to be honest.
I’m just a girl, standing in front of a blog, asking you to consider adding a boy band to your celebrations of the birth of Christ.
Specifically, I’m recommending A Very Backstreet Christmas. It’s the Backstreet Boys’ first Christmas offering since their single “Christmas Time” was released 22 years ago.
And it is GREAT.
I mean, they sound completely different than they did 22 years ago. All of their voices have deepened with age, of course, but it’s mostly the absence of Brian—who suffers from vocal tension dysphonia and has been kind of shuffled into the back of the recording booth someplace—that has turned their harmony into a different beast entirely.
I will admit that, over the years, this evolution has bugged me. The Lisa of 1997 was not making her own iron-on transfer concert shirts, NOR was she buying giant novelty BSB pencils with her allowance at Hot Topic, in the hopes of someday hearing a twangy BSB-country crossover featuring heavy doses of Kevin.
But lo, the magic of Christmas! On this album, the shift to deeper sounds, less Brian, and fewer falsettos somehow achieves late-stage BSB perfection.
Maybe that’s because the content of the songs has shifted, too. It’s a lot less of what you wished your 8th-grade boyfriend might confess in a dim gymnasium and a lot more of what you hope a committed adult would say to his or her partner. Now the boys are hoping to be home for Christmas, to listen to Marvin Gaye with their wives, and to remind all of us of the slow but certain death of our youths.
If you want to make the comparison really stark, throw on 1999’s Home for Christmas by *NSYNC, the only other notable entry in the boy band Christmas album category. “I never knew the meaning of Christmas,” Justin tells us earnestly (and falsetto-y), on a track of the same name, “until I looked into your eyes.”
Yeah.
Now, that’s not good, but I don’t mean to be hard on my younger self. We don’t have to be ashamed of how badly we craved that kind of validation from men with frosted tips in the 90s—it was the water in which we swam. (And lest we forget, “The First Noel” and “Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays” are as essential to the advent season as a box of Little Debbie Christmas Tree Cakes.) I just mean that lyrics proclaiming romance as the height of Christmas are for a certain time of life.
And we have transcended it.
This Christmas, I recommend an elevated boy band experience. Listen to A Very Backstreet Christmas. Stream it on YouTube as your Yule Log, even. And enjoy lots of cookies, because this certain time of life is always the best one we’ve got.
