Improvising a Christmas playlist is tricky enough without AI butting in

The Christmas drive up to the mountains has its traditions, rules and tunes. The original plan called for everything to be shipped up in advance on the train, while our journey would involve the cosy dining carriage on the Chur to St Moritz leg the day after for a gentle arrival in the Engadine. A schedule change (surprise! I am filing this column from Bahrain) required a speedy rethink on the transport and overall Christmas-logistics front. I devised a quick plan with my chief navigator and after a bit of tweaking here and there, we decided it would go something like this:

1.
Leave the Zürich staff Christmas party at a sensible hour.

2.
Wake up early Thursday morning to pack and be on the road by 08.00.

3. 
Get to St Moritz by lunch, pick up the tree and do a round of grocery shopping.

4.
Leave mom in charge of the decorating and coniferous styling. 

5.
Depart early Friday for Zürich and zip past the office before valeting the car at the airport with plenty of time to catch the Swiss flight to Dubai. 

One thing that was missed from the pre-departure checklist was the Christmas playlist. Up until last year, Yuletide tunes were flawlessly transmitted via a tiny iPod. Yes, go ahead and have a good laugh at my lack of modernity and spending on new tech – but there was never a need for an upgrade until my microscopic music box went missing sometime in the spring. It is hardly the season to bore you or myself with the various reasons why I have not yet searched for a replacement (is that even possible?) or a more advanced upgrade. Rather, I’ll explain what happens when you need to keep the mood in the Land Cruiser seasonally perky and opt to improvise. 

Everything would’ve been fine if modern vehicles still sported CD players but I was left to find Helene Fischer on Youtube. It pains me to even write this. No matter. I found Frau Fischer’s Weihnachts–Hits and off we went. We made it through 10 tracks before switching to Bublé. So far, so okay (Decathlon adverts aside). At about the same time that we turned off the highway for the climb up the mountain road, the playlist changed to something that Youtube claimed was from the 1940s. The first song sounded a bit familiar with all its frost, windowpanes, snowflakes and crackling. “Do I know this?” I asked my fellow passengers. “No, it’s not a classic,” said the navigator. Song two was a bit more swingy and for a moment I thought that I knew it but quickly realised that it wasn’t Dean Martin nor another Rat Packer. Song three sounded like song one but it was a female voice purring about the sax, vinyl, snowmen, crackling and windowpanes. Something was suddenly off. Would someone really reference vinyl in their lyrics circa 1947? “I think this is all AI rubbish,” I declared. 

The navigator did some quick research and soon confirmed my hunch. “These songs seem to tick all the AI-generated boxes” he said. We swiftly found our way back to humanity but this little audio incident has been nagging me all the way to the Gulf. Aside from the annoyance of being momentarily duped, what concerns me is that such rubbish is so celebrated by analysts and investors the world over. “Everyone should have substantial AI investments in their portfolios,” said a tech sorceress on Bloomberg. Really? Really? The smart money should be investing in a jazz ensemble from Kyoto for Christmas 2026 and charging appropriately for an elegant little concert season. Till then, get off the playlists, put on some Perry Como and have a superb Christmas! Cheers.

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