Tag Archives: Pagan Christmas

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A quarter century of making pagans dance.

Is it that time of year yet again? Christ on a bike, people! The pace of passing Christmases brings to mind that Mitt Romney song – “Christmas Green” – from an early episode of Ned Trek, featured on our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN:

Each second day is Christmas
preceded by its eve
Consumers take your places
We want every shop left clean

Investors won’t be waiting
All registers will ring
Flood their chests with riches
It runs like a machine
And Christmas is so green

As it happens, this is a milestone holiday season for your friends at Big Green. Our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, was released 25 years ago this year. That’s right, it is now officially 1,975 years to Christmas, depending on which way you’re counting. Tempus fugit, am I right?

With a rocket (albeit a slow one)

Did “2000 Years” become a holiday classic over the last quarter century, working its jolly way into Christmas playlists far and wide? Well … no, not really. Like pretty much all of our music, it’s been a drug on the market. (That’s an archaic expression that once was synonymous with “a flop”.) We’re niche players over here at Big Green; an acquired taste, if you will.

That said, there is one song from that album that goes off like a minor rocket every year around this time. It’s called Pagan Christmas, and it briefly became a favorite among wiccan and wiccan-adjacent communities in the northeast. Starting late November, early December, Pagan Christmas starts racking up a fair number of streaming plays on the various platforms. (It’s even done okay-ish on our YouTube channel.)

Of course, if you want to help pump the numbers a little bit, you can find us on Spotify or Apple Music or whatever the hell. It’s Christmas, man …. throw us a bone!

More where that came from

Now, I’ve said plenty of times that the songs on 2000 Years To Christmas represent only a small portion of the Christmas-themed songs we’ve written (and when I say “we”, I mean mostly my brother Matt). Over the years we’ve recorded a number of them, some of which we’ve played on THIS IS BIG GREEN. Those include Ned Trek tracks, but we also have scads of songs from back in the nineties when most of 2000 Years was written and demo-ed.

Of course, before we release THAT stuff, we need to finish our current album. That project is now in the mastering stage. We’re also working on the cover art, the hand-tooled vinyl binding, and the carved oak box that it all comes in. Hey … it takes time to whittle all them things. BE PATIENT. We’ve got something like 24 new songs coming your way this Spring, so lookout. Don’t know if there’s anything in there to make the pagans happy, but we’ll see.

Moment of shizzle

Ahem …. On behalf of all of us here at Big Green, have a happy holiday season, a merry Christmas if you celebrate, and try to make it to the new year, for crying out loud. If you’re a musician and you’re playing somewhere New Year’s eve, drive carefully (or not at all) and remember, that money has to last until March.

Usual Rubbish

Getting a little love on the internets

2000 Years to Christmas

I think you ought to run those numbers again, man. Seriously. I thought you were a statistician. You’re not? I thought every robot was a statistician! Learn something new every day, even in statistics.

Hey howdy, folks! Happy new year from your favorite band in the universe. And while we’re at it, happy new year from us, Big Green, the band you’ve likely never heard of. Chances are good you’ve never seen us perform or listened to our songs or picked up one of our CDs. Nothing wrong with that, of course – you’re just moving with the majority. (Go against the herd, man!)

Running with the numbers

I’ve called upon the small coterie of experts in our midst, namely, Mitch Macaphee and his greatest invention (or not), Marvin (my personal robot assistant), to help increase our internet plays a bit. My assumption is that they know all about the internets. One way or the other, they can hardly do worse than we have ourselves.

Take our recent nano concerts (please). The highest number of plays we’ve gotten was 25 on one of the songs; most are in the teens or single digits. Piss poor by any standard. Now, the pretentious artist in me says that we make music for its own sake, not for the approval of the audience. But that artist in me still likes to eat. And frankly he’s not paying rent on the space he’s occupying. I think anyone can see that that’s not fair.

Hit factory, shit factory

Leave us face it, Big Green is not a titan among indie bands. The Big Green video with the highest number of plays is our live version of I Hate Your Face, which comes in at a whopping 688 views. Not exactly setting any land speed records there, my friends. Our single from 2012, One Small Step, has been viewed 219 times on YouTube as of this writing. Again … not earth shaking.

Hey, look .... there's a blip over there in December.

In particular, our song Pagan Christmas, off of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, gets a bunch of plays around the holidays via streaming services, etc. By “a bunch,” I mean hundreds. Of course, via the music streaming services we get maybe 700 song plays a year. Somebody in Romania listened to our asses. How they found them with both hands I couldn’t tell you.

Happen upon us sometime

Hey, you know what they say about marketing on the internet. You don’t? Well, don’t ask me. I’m not some kind of marketing expert or something. What I do know is that, in this capitalist paradise known as digital sales, putting something on the web without paid promotion is like tossing something into the street and hoping someone happens upon it.

You know, that sounds like a good job for Marvin. HEY MARVIN – TAKE THIS BOX OF DISCS AND START TOSSING THEM AROUND RANDOMLY. THERE’S A GOOD FELLOW.

Usual Rubbish

Inside Christmas.

2000 Years to Christmas

Wait, what? It’s over? That was fast. How about Michaelmas? Is that over too? Okay, well … I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention. Was it fun? Did everybody have a good time? No? Ah … okay.

Yeah, I know – 2020 sucked, all the way to the end, right? That appears to be the consensus. Here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green has been known to keep Christmas in an unusual – perhaps singular – way. Like last year, when we built a big plaster volcano and set it off at midnight. Or three years ago, when we all got really, really high, then ended up trampling all over our neighbor’s chocolate pterodactyl farm (though the next day they denied ever even having one in the first place – strange). This year, on the other hand, was a low-key affair, given the COVID restrictions that even we observe … with the exception of our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, who eschews masks in favor of an ultraviolet force field device he wears around his neck. (It glows when it’s running – very impressive, particularly after lights out … which in the Hammer mill, comes around sunset.)

Well, at least ONE of us is safe from COVID.

Anywho, you may have noticed that we dropped an episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, lately on a kind of hiatus, but still just about kicking. Yes, like everything else about this year, it’s kind of lame, but at least it hearkens back to a simpler time …. such as the year 2017. In any case, here’s what’s in the show:

Ned Trek 35: The Romney Christmas Special / Ned Trek Reunion Special. Originally broadcast on Christmas 2017, this non-episode of Ned Trek is patterned after cast reunion specials they used to run for, I don’t know, the Brady Bunch, or …. some other tripe. Pearl is played by a different annoying actor. The Nixon Android is present, but only the guy inside the Nixon Android suit, not the voice actor who read his lines. (Note: Ned Trek is an audio podcast.) The show includes a bunch of Big Green Christmas songs, including an early mix of Bobby Sweet, remakes of Plastic Head, Christmas To End, and He Does It For Spite, and others thrown together to round out the farce. (Don’t miss the cheesy T.V. pop version of Away in a Manger at the start.)

Older Ned Trek Songs. We included a few numbers from Ned Trek 15: Santorum’s Christmas Planet, as we haven’t spun these in a good long time. They include Christmas Green (a Romney song), Horrible People (a Ned song), Neocon Christmas (a Pearl song), and Make That Christmas Shine (another Romney song, a version of which is posted on our YouTube channel).

Song: Pagan Christmas. Once again this year, we included this track from our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas. For a variety of reasons, this track gets a lot of play around Christmas. Our main streaming platform has us down for more than 300 plays this month, which for us is a lot. Kind of a minor hit with the pagan / wiccan crowd, particularly over the last ten years. Glad to have them as listeners.

Yep, it was a clip show. I know, man. Like everyone else, we’ll try to do better in 2021. Happy new year, campers!