It’s the holidays, so here in slight recognition, if not celebration, is the final Radio JRB offering of the year. It includes the only honest Christmas song, another one about Jesus, if you’re that way inclined, and a random selection of things that may or may not make you go bump as you get ready to make the most of your Dezemba. 

There are twelve days of Christmas, but that’s not enough music for our liking so we’ve doubled it to twenty-four songs, two for each day, just long enough for a drive from Joburg to Pretoria and back. 

The staff of Radio JRB are currently in the process of packing up a life and its various accoutrements, including the vinyl that we use for the playlist selection, into boxes—which may or may not make their way to foreign shores sometime in the future. Like the future of the world, everything here remains in limbo but that’s no excuse not to limber up the weary muscles—both physical and intellectual—as we all wait and see what 2025 will bring. 

It’s been, as they say, one helluva year, and we can only hope that the JRB playlists have helped to make it, if not better, at least a little more interesting. As Steve Jobs once so glibly said, ‘Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently’—the ones who got us into this mess and now won’t take any responsibility for getting us out of it. Merry Christmas to you all, goodwill to some and ‘Bah Humbug’ to the rest. 

• Tymon Smith is a member of The JRB Editorial Advisory Panel, and a freelance journalist who writes about the arts and South African history. Previously the literary editor of the Sunday Times, he is the recipient of a silver Standard Banks Arts Journalist of the Year Award for feature writing. He was the head researcher for the interactive DVD Between Life and Death: Stories from John Vorster Square, and is working on a book about the Johannesburg police station.
  
• See his previous playlists here.