Hanson’s Christmas Ball
Cain’s Ballroom
December 14, 2024
I don’t know if you know this, but Tulsa is mecca for Hanson fans. If you’ve been downtown during the annual Hanson Day celebration, which is actually an entire weekend every May, then you’ve seen the curious influx of hundreds of Hanson fans from around the world (really) who fly into Tulsa every year (really) to commune with their lifelong favorite band and with each other. We’re going on thirty years since “MmmBop,” and it’s not hyperbole to say some of Hanson’s more dedicated fans have made being a Hanson fan something of a lifestyle, a center of gravity.
I don’t know if you know this, but Hanson is mecca for me as a music writer. Hanson was the first story I ever pitched to a new publication, my first cover story in print. Hanson was also my raison d'être after moving to Oklahoma in the mid-1990s. Being a rabid Hanson fan in junior high really taught me something about identity, about loving something and being mercilessly teased for it, and about doubling down on my love for it anyway. To this day, I credit this band with thickening my pop culture skin. I have zero interest in whether or not other people approve of what I like or don’t like now, and that’s Hanson fandom, baby.
This obsession dulled and mutated over the years into an exercise in nostalgia, and my sister and I went to a lot of concerts not entirely up-to-date on what the band had been up to, because it was just a thing we did. Somewhere around 2020, for various reasons personal and political and pandemical, we dropped our end of the thread that binds Hanson’s fans to them so tightly.
Have you ever been your own Ghost of Christmas Past? Hanson performed two nights of Christmas music at Cain’s last weekend, and attending the Saturday night show felt distinctly like peering into a glowing holiday memory from outside my own body. My best guess would be that there were about 1,500 people inside Cain’s before the 8 p.m. start time, many of them entire families; we’re into second- and third-generation Hanson fans now. (Semi-related: I just confirmed via the internet that I'm now closer to Scrooge’s canonical age than Tiny Tim’s.)
Christmas does something very specific to people, and Hanson also does something very specific to people, and Hanson at Christmas causes those energies to collide, to electric effect, literally: I saw no less than thirty outfits with working Christmas lights. There were also what I would expect to see at an average, holiday-free Hanson concert, which is droves of excited middle-aged women dressed to the nines, and also their bewildered husbands.
The band has put out two fully Christmas albums, 1997’s Snowed In and 2017’s Finally It’s Christmas. They opened the show at exactly 8 p.m.—bless you, you Scrooge-aged dads—with the title track of the latter and proceeded to blaze through twenty total songs in eighty minutes, including the encore. There was little in the way of stage banter, which frankly is not their strong suit; it’s dorky in a way I found charming growing up and now lack the patience for.
The same thing that was cool about Hanson when they were children is still true now, which is that they’re all very talented technical musicians who stumbled onto a massive pop hit. As objectively as possible, I’ll say that some of their original Christmas songs are timeless and great, while others sound a little like Christmas stock music. The closed loop fandom welcomes these highs and lows with equal fervor, which is sort of sweet, if mysterious from the outside looking in.
For me, the highlights were largely from the 1997 record, remarkable since one member of the band hadn’t even hit puberty when they made it. Drummer Zac’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” has changed over the years from a cute kid pretending to wail to an adult man who actually can; his singing voice has something glam rock about it that strangely works with the pageantry of Christmas music. The person I saw hoist her own huge Christmas tree into the air to the beat must have agreed.
Taylor’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” is one of the renditions of the Phil Spector classic I’m happiest to hear, even when coupled with his relentless crowd participation prompts and violent tambourine playing. Special mention to the bewildered husband nearby who didn’t argue when his wife gave a firm “No!” when he asked if this song was a cover.
Based on the screams at the opening piano riff of “Merry Christmas Baby,” track one on Snowed In, the song shook loose the same 1997 in me as everyone else. I saw a lot of FaceTimes during this one and did one of my own (my sister couldn’t come to the show with me). If there were an annual Hanson Christmas concert of just Taylor playing this song, I would go every year for this singular injection of holiday cheer.
There were a few moments that broke up the Christmas magic for me. Zac’s religious preamble to “Peace on Earth,” about the real meaning of Christmas being the birth of Jesus Christ, was met with a lone audible “Boo!” from somewhere in the middle of the crowd. The band’s version of Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmas Time,” which is already my third least-favorite Christmas song, is at such a fast tempo that it becomes more stressful than wonderful. And I consider Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” untouchable in its perfection, yet they did touch it.
They closed with what I assumed they would close with: a sweet, a cappella version of “White Christmas.” At the end of Snowed In, you hear the baby voice of one of the younger, non-band Hanson siblings after this song. In real life in 2024, we saw them sing this to a room full of their own families, their sisters selling merch, their babies in the crowd. A precious, lovely, meaningful cap for a touring year of Tulsa’s hometown heroes, all of whom recently had their faces muralized on the Cain’s smoking patio, and one of whom was just named one of Tulsa World’s Tulsans of the Year.
It was an astonishing night for non-local local musicians downtown, with Tulsa expat Kaitlin Butts and Tulsa resident Ken Pomeroy at Vanguard and Oologah’s Zach Bryan at the BOK Center, in addition to everyone else who’d normally be playing on a Saturday night. Should any of them retain even a fraction of the fan fealty their Tulsa neighbors have inspired, we should be able to watch them downtown again, too, in another thirty years.
