While many attempt to survive Whamageddon (a trending seasonal game in which you’re “out” as soon as you suffer inadvertent exposure to ’80s-era pop-duo Wham!’s holiday standard “Last Christmas”), I’m waiting for the older chestnuts — the ones extolled in the rich, calm voice of Nat King Cole in “The Christmas Song.” I can rant about the commercialization of the season, holiday shopping traffic and the well-meaning atrocity of “Do They Know It’s Christmas” with the best of them — but give me a cup of hot chocolate, “It’s a Wonderful Life” and Cole, and I can go from work-stress ragey to Ellen DeGeneres in five seconds flat. The ubiquity of Cole’s song and the persuasive warmth of his voice unfolding it has created, I think, a strange phenomenon: One of the activities we most associate with the season is one that most of us have never actually performed.