Dual Yule

Christmas, His & Hers.

He's "Holmes for the Holidays." She's "The Magic of Christmas." He's at the Suncoast. She's at the South Point. He -- and she -- fuel two musical yules, three shows apiece, over one merry weekend.

In separate interviews we've stitched together (they later hooked up at our photo shoot at Town Square), Clint Holmes and Susan Anton talk concerts, Christmas and striking a seasonal vibe:

Question: What holiday heartwarmers will we hear at the concerts?

Holmes: Flash and dazzle! Well, it's not going to just be holiday music, but there are certain evergreens, some of them familiar, some of them not. There's a song I was given in 1998 called "William the Angel" that I have sung every year since, and to me it's a Christmas standard. The beauty of it is, I've never heard anybody else do it. And I'm always trying to introduce new material because you can find a gem.

There's a song, "This Year," that my musical director gave me to listen to, and I loved it. It is one of those songs that is right now, about how we can't do as much as we normally do this Christmas. But here's one thing we can do: take care of each other. And people want to hear "chestnuts roasting on an open fire" ("The Christmas Song") and "Winter Wonderland" because we only get to hear them once a year.

Anton: The music will be a celebration of the more religious tones of the classics of "Do You Hear What I Hear" and "Breath of Heaven," "Silent Night," as well as the popular ones we cherish growing up, like "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" and "Sleigh Ride," even John Lennon's "Happy Christmas." A real potpourri of holiday memories, because it's about celebrating the birth of Christ and my relationship with my Lord and savior. I'm not going to hit anybody over the head, but we've all gotten a little too politically correct with "Happy Holidays" or "Joyous Season." It's "Merry Christmas." If it was my birthday, I wouldn't want them to call it something else.

Q: You're not concerned about offending people who'd prefer a more secular concert?

Anton: It felt disingenuous to compromise who I am and what matters to me. If there's a responsibility of a performer, it's to share what you authentically are. If you try to become vanilla, then we don't have any thoughts and emotions to bounce off of. There are a lot of people who want to hear those songs. We were raised hearing these songs all of our lives. And this is the time of year this music comes to life. Certainly, we want to be inclusive, and it's something that all walks of faith enjoy.

It's what moves me. You have to be emotionally involved with your material if you want the audience to be emotionally involved. The audience is very, very smart, and you don't need to cater down to an audience, you just need to be honest with them. If you are willing to share, then they'll share back with you.

Q: Any surprises this year?

Holmes: What's going to separate this show is I'm having my sister and my wife (performer Kelly Clinton) and a couple of the guys from the Las Vegas Tenors, and we're going to do a section that will feel very familial and do everybody's favorites, a 20-minute hunk where it would be as if we're all sitting around the piano with eggnog. That will be a bit of a throwback to warm and fuzzy, ya know?

We're going to open the show with a very different version of "The Christmas Song," a whole different arrangement we've come up with. I do "The Little Drummer Boy," but I do it with mouth-percussion stuff, where I'm the drummer.

My sister Gail is singing "My Special Christmas Wish," which is very funny, because it starts off like it's going to be one of those very sentimental songs, and then she sings, "My very special Christmas wish is ... I wanna be rich, I wanna be famous, I don't wanna work anymore!"

Q: Any special Christmas memories you'd care to share?

Anton: One of my treasured memories of growing up was when my father would gather us around in the midst of all the more commercial aspects of Christmas, and he would read us the Christmas story and remind us of the reason we were gathering and celebrating. It had a profound impact on me. I just look forward to sharing all of that with the audiences.

Holmes: My dad and I used to chop down our Christmas tree every year. There was an area outside of Buffalo where they had pine trees. I would schlep along, and my dad would chop down the tree and we'd drag it back to the car. So I will always have a real tree. I'm not chopping them down these days, but that tradition of having a real tree is important.

Q: No nice, shiny aluminum trees?

Holmes: Never in my house.

Q: You grew up in Buffalo, where it snows about eight months a year, or seems to.

Holmes: My dad used to drive a snowplow, that was one of his jobs, so that was a real part of our lives. And we always had white Christmases, that's for sure. One of the Christmases I remember, I was probably about 10 years old, was when I got a football helmet and I spent all of Christmas Day diving over this snow pile that the plow had left, calling it the goal line, scoring touchdowns.

Q: Susan, what was it like all the way across the country at Christmas?

Anton: I was raised in a little town (near Yucaipa, Calif., on an apple farm) and it's over 5,000 feet elevation, so we actually would get white Christmases. I'll never forget one Christmas, we always had the big Christmas Eve dinner, and we'd open the one present and go to bed and be so excited you could hardly sleep. It was a cool night, and I'd listen to Christmas carols on the radio all night long. I'll never forget waking up that morning, opening the window and everything was covered in snow. It was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. So when I'm singing, "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas," that moment in time is just crystallized for me forever and ever.

Q: What will Christmas Eve look like at the Holmes household this year?

Holmes: Everybody's coming to my house for dinner, and everybody's bringing something. My mom always makes Yorkshire pudding. That's the British side of my family.

Q: What are you grateful for at this time of year?

Anton: With all that's going on in the world, the economy being what it is, I always see the blessing that comes. It's nice to see people returning to each other, to the simple things and gifts that are homemade, knowing that the greatest gift we can give one another is our time. It's nice to see people relying on one another's kindness.

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0256.