It’s easy to write a Christmas song once you let go of the idea that you’re competing with Mariah Carey. That’s what Whitehorse found anyway. So easy, in fact, that the band (Whitehorse is made up of husband/wife duo Melissa McLelland and Luke Doucet) came up with a whole album of holiday tunes once they got started.
“We kind of did it with a gun to our head,” says Doucet over a Zoom call. The gunslinger, in this case, was the band’s longtime label, Six Shooter Records, but there’s no hard feelings about the nudge into holiday standards. Quite the opposite. As a self-professed “table-pounding atheist” who wasn’t even sure if he liked the idea of Christmas, Doucet was pleasantly surprised to find A Whitehorse Winter Classic was fun to make.
“We realized we had many, many stories to tell when it came to the holidays,” says McClelland. “There are a lot of dark corners of the holidays. You know, it brings out a lot of challenging emotions in people and so we definitely mined some of those stories, as well as the more kind of joyful, magical moments that you feel on holidays.”
Since the record came out in 2018, the band has been playing it live on a regular basis. In the past, they’ve performed in their transplanted hometown of Burlington, Ontario, as part of a fundraiser for Ladybird Animal Sanctuary, an animal welfare charity McClelland co-founded. Eventually, it expanded to Winnipeg, where Doucet grew up. When they play the Yukon Arts Centre Dec. 16 and 17, it will mark the first time they’ve brought the tour this far west. They hope it continues to grow, partly because it’s become kind of a Christmas tradition for their own family, which includes their 11-year-old son (and no matter what your feelings are around celebrating a myth, says Doucet, you’d have to be a sociopath not to indulge a kid who’s at an age where Christmas still holds a sense of wonder).
“It’s interesting to have a record that you only play once a year,” says McClelland. Leading up to December, she dusts dust off the songs, like decorations, and get re-acquainted with them before putting them on display. “It’s like seeing an old friend. They’re familiar, but we ignore them the rest of the year. It’s nice to come back to them and I hope the listener has a similar experience.”
Not that the event will be all about the holidays. The band will play plenty from their back catalogue, which includes more than half a dozen records dating back to 2011. This includes 2023’s twangy country record, I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying (a reaction to falling down a 70s country music rabbit hole around the time of two tragedies—the pandemic and the 2020 death of musician, John Prine), the Juno-award-winning Leave No Bridge Unburned and The Fate of the World Depends on This Kiss, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Polaris Music Prize.
Doucet realizes people have different experiences of the holidays. It can be religious, somber, joyful, a charade or any one of hundreds of things for individuals. Personally, he finds the end of the year to be emotional in terms of seeing it as a map of the progress of your life—a time to take stock and say let’s try this again. He and McClelland hope that, no matter what audiences bring to the performance, they come away feeling a sense of camaraderie, community and celebration of the fact that we’re all in this thing together.
If you’re a prude, don’t go to the Yukon Arts Centre on Halloween. “Just so you know, there’s gonna be titties,” says Chérie Coquette, one of the founders of Babes in the Bush, the Yukon burlesque troupe that’s performing as…
