I’m sure you have at least had peripheral contact with this year’s campaign of the annual War on Christmas, where at least one radio station took “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” off their annual list of “holiday” songs because it suggests a woman being pressured into sex because it’s too cold outside to go home. And while the current regard to unequal power relationships means that people are more sensitive to this sort of thing, the song was written at a time when people were expected to be coy about their romantic desires, and just as the standard of political correctness has changed, in the future, the context of the song may change even more. For example, in previous generations, it used to get cold outside.
About the only area where I agree with my more cynical leftist friends is that we could use “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” as a means of purging all the other stupid “Christmas” songs that really have nothing to do with Christmas as a religious festival and much more to do with a bygone time where “traditional” Christmas characters were literally created by department stores to sell stuff. Not that I can stand most modern music, but it’s not quite so obvious on the PA systems of every store and gas station I go into the way Christmas music is. “White Christmas,” “Last Christmas,” the entire Mannheim Steamroller catalog… truly, Christmas is the whitest holiday of the year.
So it requires a certain exercise of intellect and taste for me to think of the Christmas songs that I actually like. And there are quite a few. Some of these are just as well exposed as the other classics, and a few are more obscure.
Here in no particular order:
Nat King Cole, “The Christmas Song”
What is my all time favorite Christmas song? “The Christmas Song” (‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire’) as sung by Nat King Cole.
What is my least favorite Christmas song? ‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire’ as sung by ANYBODY ELSE.
“Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy”, David Bowie and Bing Crosby
Quite possibly the strangest premise for a duet in pop music history. This scene was recorded for a Bing Crosby Christmas special just months before Bing died of a sudden heart attack, and the show featured several celebrity guests including Bowie. Bing Crosby was a traditional (as in, conservative) American music icon. Bowie was… Bowie. At the time, Bowie had an ambivalent relationship to Christianity (much like his relationship to heteronormativity) and he didn’t want to do a traditional Christmas song. So the show’s writers created an original tune on the set and rehearsed it for Bowie to sing in counterpoint with Bing. This is the result.
The Pogues, “Fairytale of New York”
Featuring guest singer Kristy MacColl and lead singer Shane MacGowan (‘like Tom Waits, only less articulate’), this latter-day classic is less about Christmas than about the Irish experience in America, and less about a love-hate romance with a person than the Irish romantic relationship with New York City. Other aspects of the Irish experience in this video include: allusions to ‘Galway Bay,’ substance abuse, jail and slurred obscenities.
King Diamond, “No Presents for Christmas”
Because, really.
“Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”
Several friends have pointed out to me that while the version popularized by Frank Sinatra and other singers was re-written to be more universal and tuneful, it was originally written for the 1944 musical Meet Me In St. Louis, in the context of a hard-luck story where one of the main characters gets a marriage proposal on Christmas Eve but is told on the same day that her father is moving the family and she may never see her fiance again. This was also in the context of a country where many young men were at war and did not know if they would ever come back. The song as originally done had the bridge in the past tense as “Once again as in olden days/Happy golden days of yore/Faithful friends who were dear to us/Will be near to us once more”. And the last verse was “Someday soon, we all will be together/if the fates allow/Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow”. In fact, this was not even the draft version, as Judy Garland and the producers asked the songwriter to make the lyrics less depressing. Most of the time, it’s delivered with the same sort of cool gaiety as “The Christmas Song,” but many purists insist that if you’re not singing “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” as a tragic ballad, you’re missing the point.
Anyway, here’s the original Judy Garland version. Just to make it extra sad.
Cheech & Chong, “Santa Claus and His Old Lady”
This is much more of a sketch than a song, but it illustrates in a silly way how various communities have, throughout history, made up their own Christmas myths, some of which are now taken more seriously than others.
“A Charlie Brown Christmas” Soundtrack Album
The whole thing. It’s that good. It actually has a sort of raw, spontaneous feeling compared to modern production, like with the children’s choir on “Christmas Time is Here.” A modern version of the same thing would end up much more polished. An example of how music can be “quiet” and still have complexity and energy.
Bob and Doug McKenzie, “The Twelve
Days of Christmas”
I like how the choir just breaks in with
“TWELVE!” so they can get the whole thing over with.
The Kinks, “Father Christmas”
Silly premise. Serious message. Serious rock.
Greg Lake, “I Believe in Father Christmas”
Greg Lake was lead singer of Emerson, Lake and Palmer (and original singer of King Crimson). Like David Bowie, Lake was ambivalent toward religion (at least at the time he wrote this song) and the song addresses the matter of how one can believe in the Christmas holiday when one has been disillusioned by both religion and “the holiday season.” In the end the singer finds a greater meaning in the event. “Hallelujah, Noel, be it Heaven or Hell/At Christmas, we get we deserve.”
Sacred Music (ex. Silent Night, O Holy Night)
As John Podhoretz points out, the Anglosphere’s greatest Christmas story, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, never mentions the name Jesus and barely mentions church. But it’s largely because of that one story that Christmas has such a high priority in the secular calendar when in the Christian calendar it is necessarily secondary to Easter.
In 1976, Ayn Rand said: “A national holiday, in this country, cannot have an exclusively religious meaning. The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion: it is good will toward men—a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property (though it is supposed to be part, but is a largely unobserved part) of the Christian religion.
“The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: “Merry Christmas”—not “Weep and Repent.”
And the well documented fact that so many composers of the Great American Songbook were Jewish, and did so much to create the American Christmas with songs like Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” just points up the fact that in this country, where we have both the First Amendment and an official holiday on December 25, Christmas Day represents the various community traditions that celebrate a holiday on or near the Winter Solstice.
Artists pulled away from Christianity and emphasized only the happy, humanist stuff that anyone could agree with, as opposed to the deep theological conflicts that led to Byzantine Empire politics, Church schisms and the Thirty Years War. In this way, our generic Christmas does a lot more to promote “Peace on Earth, and good will toward men” than a religion that frequently delivers the exact opposite.
But if American Christmas delivers an ecumenical, (small c) catholic message of hope, the flip side is that our commercial “holiday season” isn’t really about anything other than itself. Which is why, despite being atheist, I often find myself liking the specifically religious music more than the Tin Pan Alley stuff, which almost seems intended to be insipid. Which has nothing to do with its religious content or lack thereof. When I say “insipid” I mean that such music lacks character or complexity. (There is a category of explicitly faith-based music that still qualifies as insipid: Christian rock.)
So when done right, such music can be genuinely inspirational. Such as:
Or:
Or even:
I mean, there was one point where Cartman got hit with the cattle prod and he almost sounded like Jim Nabors.