It’s Brian Wilson vs. Mike Love in a Very Beach Boys Xmas

The two cousins will each hit the Christmas circuit this year with separate holiday tours

More than 50 years after the Beach Boys sang

“Little Saint Nick,” Brian Wilson and Mike Love are both doing holiday concerts, yet another strange chapter in rock’s longest-running dysfunctionalfamily saga. On his monthlong Yuletide tour, Wilson is performing the Beach Boys’ 1964 Christmas Album in full, while Love and his iteration of the Beach

Boys will tour in support of his solo album Reason for the Season. (Unlike Wilson’s show, Love’s will include the beloved Yuletide carol “Kokomo.”)

These two cousins have been anything but together in recent years. In 2012, the Beach Boys’ 50th reunion tour crashed and burned when Love issued a surprise press release saying he was ditching his mates. Wilson responded, “It sort of feels like we’re being fired.” The two of them released competing memoirs in 2016, giving wildly contradictory accounts of their years together. Wilson has spent the past two years performing the full-scale Pet Sounds. (Will he ever do a tour dedicated to Wild Honey or Today? How about Surf’s Up? Sunflower?) Love, on the other hand, has been working harder than usual to live up to his ornery reputation, recently

It’s some kind of cosmic prank that this shy genius and cocky frontman were doomed to grow up side by side, making music together.

stopping by the White House to give a bizarre speech alongside Donald Trump. “You’ve always been a big supporter of some of the best music America has ever made,” Love told the president. “I remember you tried your best to get Whitney Houston into some kind of shape.” (Houston, who sang “Do You Hear What I Hear?” on 1987’s A Very Special Christmas, was unavailable for comment.)

Wilson and Love might be blood relatives — but that’s part of why we obsess over the Beach Boys.

The shy, tormented boy genius who wrote “California Girls” and the cocky frontman who sang it — it’s some kind of cosmic prank that they were doomed to make music together. Let’s face it, the holiday season means two things you can count on: (1) agonizing over the obnoxious cousin who drives you insane, and (2) hearing “Jingle Bell Rock.” For a Beach Boys fan, it means both at the same time. ROB SHEFFIELD