Hanson’s Christmas Ball
Cain’s Ballroom
December 14, 2024
I don’t know if you know this, but Tulsa is mecca for Hanson fans. If you’ve been downtown during the annual Hanson Day celebration, which is actually an entire weekend every May, then you’ve seen the curious influx of hundreds of Hanson fans from around the world (really) who fly into Tulsa every year (really) to commune with their lifelong favorite band and with each other. We’re going on thirty years since “MmmBop,” and it’s not hyperbole to say some of Hanson’s more dedicated fans have made being a Hanson fan something of a lifestyle, a center of gravity.
I don’t know if you know this, but Hanson is mecca for me as a music writer. Hanson was the first story I ever pitched to a new publication, my first cover story in print. Hanson was also my raison d'être after moving to Oklahoma in the mid-1990s. Being a rabid Hanson fan in junior high really taught me something about identity, about loving something and being mercilessly teased for it, and about doubling down on my love for it anyway. To this day, I credit this band with thickening my pop culture skin. I have zero interest in whether or not other people approve of what I like or don’t like now, and that’s Hanson fandom, baby.
This obsession dulled and mutated over the years into an exercise in nostalgia, and my sister and I went to a lot of concerts not entirely up-to-date on what the band had been up to, because it was just a thing we did. Somewhere around 2020, for various reasons personal and political and pandemical, we dropped our end of the thread that binds Hanson’s fans to them so tightly.
Have you ever been your own Ghost of Christmas Past? Hanson performed two nights of Christmas music at Cain’s last weekend, and attending the Saturday night show felt distinctly like peering into a glowing holiday memory from outside my own body. My best guess would be that there were about 1,500 people inside Cain’s before the 8 p.m. start time, many of them entire families; we’re into second- and third-generation Hanson fans now. (Semi-related: I just confirmed via the internet that I'm now closer to Scrooge’s canonical age than Tiny Tim’s.)
Christmas does something very specific to people, and Hanson also does something very specific to people, and Hanson at Christmas causes those energies to collide, to electric effect, literally: I saw no less than thirty outfits with working Christmas lights. There were also what I would expect to see at an average, holiday-free Hanson concert, which is droves of excited middle-aged women dressed to the nines, and also their bewildered husbands.
The band has put out two fully Christmas albums, 1997’s Snowed In and 2017’s Finally It’s Christmas. They opened the show at exactly 8 p.m.—bless you, you Scrooge-aged dads—with the title track of the latter and proceeded to blaze through twenty total songs in eighty minutes, including the encore. There was little in the way of stage banter, which frankly is not their strong suit; it’s dorky in a way I found charming growing up and now lack the patience for.