Ultimate Christmas Playlist Day 24: The O’Jays, ‘I Can Hardly Wait Til Christmas’

What’s Christmas without classic music? This year we’re celebrating the holidays by letting our readers curate the Ultimate Christmas Playlist. Each day we’ll add one new song to our Spotify playlist on our way to Christmas Day. And I know you wanna add your favorite song, right?

Leave your selections on the comments of this post, at our Soul In Stereo Cypher Facebook page, hit me up on Twitter @etbowser, or email us at soulinstereoblog@gmail.com. Simply name your song and give us a sentence or so telling us why you love it. 

So today’s entry comes with a story! Sometime in the mid-00s – before y’all’s president was orange and your favorite rappers were reality TV weirdos – I spent the holidays with my future in-laws. Of course, as the days got closer to Christmas, my then-girlfriend’s father would constantly blast soulful holiday classics.

But there was one song that stood out; it was one I had never heard it before. And it was awesome.

Here’s the weird part – no one in the house seemed to know the artists or the real name of the song. Those husky notes, though, sounded straight from the diaphragm of my dude Gerald Levert.

I was close.

I soon discovered that the mystery song was The O’Jay’s “I Can Hardly Wait Til Christmas,” and I couldn’t believe I lived 20-something years without it in my life. My new favorite is definitely finding a home on our playlist.