Solar System Simon & the Hippo

I realized this year that it’s good each year to hear a Christmas song you’ve never heard before. At least one. This isn’t very hard if you go out only slightly off the holiday path populated by the usual-suspect songs.

A few years ago on Christmas Eve the deejays on WDCB were playing the most out-of-the-way Christmas music they could find, and I heard a thing called “Solar System Simon, Santa’s Supersonic Son,” a title so obscure that if you surround it in quotation marks, Google pulls up only two references—one of those pages a 404, the other a list of records for sale by a website. Recorded sometime in the 1950s I think. I don’t remember even one line, but I remember having fun listening to it.

This year one of the new-to-me songs was “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas,” a novelty recorded in 1953. It was on the commercial station that plays Christmas music from about Thanksgiving to Christmas (see December 5) and we heard it on the way to the Museum of Science & Industry on Christmas Eve. When heard once, a fun ditty, but I suspect that it would wear pretty thin pretty fast.

I was astonished that WLIT played it at all. It’s a station that doesn’t usually play obscure songs. As it turns out, though, it was no accident. A children’s book of the same name, and apparently based on the song, was released earlier this fall. I sense the efforts of the publisher’s publicity machine, encouraging stations to play the song again, to drum up interest in the book.