Low’s wonderful Christmas album is a staple in my house at this time of year. This is my favourite song.

And the funny thing is that the most Christmassy song is not one of the old favourites like Silent Night and Little Drummer Boy that they tackle in characteristically droney, dirgey fashion (and I mean that in a good way).

Just Like Christmas is a self-penned song written on a Scandinavian tour about a wintry journey from Stockholm to their next gig, after Alan Sparhawk offered the opinion that when it snowed that it was “just like Christmas”.

Mimi Parker, his wife and bandmate, disagrees, singing that “It wasn’t like Christmas at all.” By the time they got to Oslo, she recalls, the snow was gone, and they got lost, and the beds were small.
“But we felt so young… It was just like Christmas.”

The song has extra poignancy now, following Mimi’s death two years ago, at the age of only 55, bringing an end to Low – a band I was fortunate to have seen not so long before that at St John’s Church in Hackney.