Hear Hear! (Songs for The Baby Jesus Season)

Do you know it’s Christmas? Hilma knows. After ten years of devoted seasonal work, her fabled Christmas record is at last wrapped and ready for the record shelves.

Though Hilma, even at the age of five, named “Sisel/I Sing a Christmas Hymn” as her favorite tune in her sister’s school diary, she hails from the realm of punk — and her winter project might seem no obvious calling.

It is no small thing to fashion an orthodox Christmas record. When the first snow descends, and multitudes hasten through the markets in pursuit of the season’s trifles, Hilma receives the quiet summons she needs. To write and preserve these songs has become her own yuletide toils — a ritual of reckoning with the year gone by, and of setting the first tone for the one to come.