Welcome to the 2025 Heistmas Advent Calendar, a daily drop of pop culture Christmas icons, oddities, and joy. Check back every day from now through December 25 for each daily entry!
Christmas can be a bittersweet time, because for so many of us it will always feel like something, or someone, is missing. There's a reason that so many classic Christmas songs are about missing people, or places, or times we can't reclaim, and when it comes to music about those hard times and trying to see beyond them, it rarely gets better than The Pogues classic "Fairytale of New York."
This is a song that begins with "It was Christmas Eve, babe, in the drunk tank," and describes an old man who believes he'll die before he sees the next holiday season. It's about people in a mess, people with dreams to chase that they've never quite reached, but it's also about people with a hope for something more. If you're feeling down on Christmas, it's kinda the perfect song. It's no wonder, then, that when The Pogues founder Shane MacGowan passed away at the end of November in 2023, "Fairytale of New York" became an integral part of how his friends and family said goodbye.
MacGowan's funeral, held in Ireland on December 8, 2023, was practically a royal affair. Nick Cave sang! Bono sent a recording of a Biblical reading! The President of Ireland was sitting in the front row, all to bid farewell to one of the most important Irish musicians of the 20th and 21st century. And, because of the timing of MacGowan's death, the church was decorated for Christmas, which meant that "Fairytale of New York" seemed to be hanging in the air even before you heard a single note.
If you watch the livestream of the funeral back, the song itself arrives without fanfare. A traditional Catholic communion is offered, and while mourners file up and down the aisles to receive the sacrament, somber, haunting Irish folk instrumentals are played. You barely notice that the number of musicians onstage seems to be steadily growing, that something is building just beyond MacGowan's rose-covered coffin. And then it just happens. Like something inevitable.
With Irish singer-songwriters Glen Hansard and Lisa O'Neill dueting the vocals, and surviving members of The Pogues in the backing band, it starts as a moving tribute, a sweet moment on a day of loss. By the time the tempo picks up, though, it's a raucous, unrestrained celebration of life, of the kind of drunken, mad hope MacGowan offered every time he struck up this song. By the end, people are literally yanking each other up and out of the aisles to dance. Funerals are always hard, but December funerals are especially hard, and I can't help but feel like MacGowan's loved ones stumbled upon some secret formula to transform grief into something ecstatic here.
So, this one goes out to everyone who has a hard time in December, everyone who's lost someone, and of course to my beloved Aunt Margaret, who we mourned in a December funeral in a church not unlike the one in the video. I don't know if she knew about The Pogues, but I know she would have loved this.
So Happy Christmas.
I love you, baby!
I can see a better time
when all our dreams come true.
Check back tomorrow for even more Heistmas Advent Calendar Goodies!
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