Christmas in Hollis was a festive time of family, gold chains and holiday cheer. It was a vision painted by Run DMC and Jam Master Jay, way back in 1987. Run explains how Christmas In Hollis came about like a gift from God, 24 years ago and what Christmas is like at Run’s House!
GlobalGrind: Christmas In Hollis might be the most iconic Christmas rap song ever made. How did that song come about?
Rev Run:
‘It’s a funny story about Christmas in Hollis. I was in a writing mood when I got a call from Bill Adler, who was working with Rush management as the publicist and he was like Joe, ‘we have this Very Special Christmas album being done by Special Olympics, can we do a Christmas record?’
I remember that morning I was really feeling good. I was in a space of swagger, moving! I wasn’t Rev, I was just Run! I felt real good. I was sitting there eating French Toast and the pen just started moving. After I hung up with Bill Adler, two seconds later, it had to be God, because I just like (starts rapping) ‘It was December 24th on Hollis Ave. after dark when I seen a man chilling…‘ and the pen just kept going and my mind just kept flashing every bit of the story. All the way till it got to the end of the story that Santa made a mistake and dropped his wallet in Hollis and I was the good guy. I was like I’m not going to steal from Santa, but when I got home the money in the wallet was for me. That rhyme happened in two seconds, and I was done. If Bill called me at 9:30am, I called him back at 9:45 saying ‘Oh My God! I wrote the record’, then i just passed it off to D and he wrote his rhyme.
I didn’t know the importance of it, I just knew that I had wrote a dope rhyme. I knew for sure this rhyme was dope. It kept coming together when we went to the studio. That night Bill Adler came in with a stack of records under his arm. And Jay looked through them. That sample, I don’t know where Jay pulled it up, but he said this is dope and I said yeah, I agree.
He started putting beats under it and we busted the record out quick. I didn’t realize that most artists were just singing over songs from the 60’s and 70’s. I didn’t realize people weren’t writing original material. Until later someone was like yeah everybody just sings Silent Night and Frosty The Snowman when they’re asked to do it. So the album was actually full of songs that were actually old songs sung by new artists. I had no idea that it was going to be that big or that important, but I was happy to do it.’
