Is it just me, or does a lot of Christmas nostalgia come from the 1950s and the 1980s. I'm not saying that Christmas wasn't awesome in the 1970s or any other decade, but when we collectively pull things together from the past that we want to in our modern Christmas, these two time periods seem to be our nostalgia mines of choice.
One thing that really hasn't survived to modern times is the Christmas music videos of the 1980s, so let's drag some out into the limelight and give them their place in the sun on Music Video Relapse. Today we're watching 1984's "Last Christmas" by Wham!
The video finds Wham! and friends enjoying the boom years of the 80s by going up to a ski lodge for some festive holiday fun. As is to be expected, everyone is sufficiently done up in only the bulkiest of the bulky coats.
There's a lot of Christmas bustle inside this lodge/cabin. People are walking in from outside with logs and stuff and plates are being set for a big dinner. At that dinner, we learn that one of the ladies at the ski lodge is George Michael's former gal pal. In a flashback we see he gave her a 1980s brooch thing and she's still wearing it because hey, free brooch.
Looks like Andrew Ridgeley is her new squeeze though. Always a cool guy, George doesn't get flustered. He's not going to flip out about his friend loving all up on his former woman at his ski lodge (can you prove it isn't his ski lodge?). He sips some more of that sweet 1980s white wine. Goes down smooth. Andrew Ridgeley has some balls to pull this one. However, George Michael knows Andrew Ridgeley is just a stepping stone to big and better things than Wham!, all he has to do is wait. Wait and sip.
After dinner people are spaced out. I mean, really spaced out - like they are all coming down off of some powerful 1980s Christmas drug and not the white/red wine we all clearly saw them drink at dinner. After a night of spacing out, they leave, and that's that.
Judging by the sheer number of covers of this song, this is definitely on the list of Christmas songs you are going to know no matter when you were born. The video doesn't really have anything that we could call iconic in music video terms, but it's a fun video that at the very least makes us wish we had a ski lodge that we could go hang out in with our goofy Christmas drug friends. In the same way that the song is about moving on and not being super broken up about love lost, the video is about moving on as well. I get the feeling that even though George Michael will play their little ski lodge friend game, he's over it. He's got a notebook at home that has the saxophone part for "Careless Whisper" all laid out. Soon, George, soon.
