The Christmas Dept.

Silent Night may be good enough for some people, but not for the sales-bent pop music trade. By last week the industry could proudly report that, since early fall, it has produced 87 new pop singles for the Christmas market--with Santa Glaus mentioned in the titles of only 26 of them.*

The cascade ranged in mood from Silent Night itself and a musical rendering of the Lord's Prayer to a husky-voiced double-entendre by Eartha Kitt entitled Santa Baby, and something called Cool Yule, sung and trumpeted by Louis ("Satchmo") Armstrong. But inevitably, after the runaway success of last year's I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus (TIME, Dec. 15), the best brains in the pop music business have been boiling overtime to find another small-fry special.

By last week it looked as though Columbia Records' Mitch Miller, the maestro who produced I Saw Mommy, was ahead of the field again. Title of his new prize number: I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas. It had just about all the necessary ingredients, including a juvenile songstress, an implacable rhythm and severely single-minded lyrics. Sample:

Don't want a doll, no dinky tinkertoy,

I want a hippopotamus to play with and enjoy.

The songstress, plucked from an Oklahoma City TV show, is a ten-year-old named Gayla Peevey. Gayla has a precociously mature manner before a microphone and delivers her lines with the raucous confidence of an Ethel Merman. In recognition of the fact that Hippopotamus has already sold better than 300,000 copies, i.e., about as well as Mommy at the same time last year, Mitch Miller and Columbia are hunting up more songs for her to sing. In a recognition of its own, Oklahoma City's WKY-TV, which discovered Gayla, began an air campaign this week for public donations to buy her a hippopotamus for Christmas.

* Among the year's variations: Santa Claus Rides a Strawberry Roan, Missus Santa Claus, How Can Santa Come to Puerto Rico?

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.