Then there’s that wonderful Christmas classic Fairytale of New York:
I saw this once and forgot the name of the group, so thanks for listing it. I was trying to describe it to someone, I said there was a bar, and Irish people, and a fistfight, and they said “Pogues. That’s the Pogues.” So, I guess it IS the Pogues! great song.
Merely by its placing in winter. It’s appropriate well into March, but it now seems silly, or boring, by St Stephen’s Day (12/26), not St Polycarp’s (2/23).
That is a problem, amply solved by radio stations that start playing them starting on All Saints’ Day, of playing Winter songs, especially Winter Solstice songs, LONG before they are appropriate. Christmas is a specifically Christian holiday. By Dec 25 we residents of northern climes are usually sick of winter and are looking forward to spring, which is usually months away.
A New York Times op-ed piece by cabaret singer and music historian Michael Feinstein on this: “If you look at a list of the most popular Christmas songs, you’ll find that the writers are disproportionately Jewish . . .”
No, nowadays we’re so conditioned to think of traffic as a Bad Thing that if we say, “The traffic was great”, we’re understood to mean that there were very few cars on the road and we made great time.
This bothered me when I first heard No Place Like Home, as a kid. To me, “traffic was terrific” = no traffic. But celebrating deserted highways seemed at odds with the song. If There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays, people should be going home, damn it! “No traffic” made it sound like, “Hah hah, I’m going home for the holidays, and the roads are empty because the rest of you losers are stuck in boot camp!”
The answer, of course, was that “traffic=terrific”, at the time, meant lots of traffic. And lots of traffic in that era didn’t mean gridlock. So you could celebrate it: “The traffic is terrific; look at all these happy people going home!” Nowadays you’d say, "%&#^& this traffic jam."
Eonwe writes:
> I agree with Wendell Wagner completely. In particular, Christmas is about
> nostalgia. You hear the same recordings of the same songs year after year
> because that’s what Christmas sounded like when we were kids. The image of
> Christmas is all about recapturing the joy and innocence of youth when we
> believed in Santa, and reindeer really knew how to fly, and stuff.
You may misunderstand what I was saying when I wrote that one of the themes of the Christmas songs written between 1935 and 1965 was nostalgia. I didn’t mean that people today are nostalgic for those songs, although that’s also true. I meant that even in that period (1935 to 1965) the songs were about things that were already long in the past. Even during that period, very few people spent Christmas in a horse-drawn sleigh or in front of a roaring fireplace. These sorts of things were common in 1890, perhaps. The Christmas songs we listen to today are playing on nostalgia about nostalgia, since they playing on our memories of listening to songs that even when they were written, probably before we were born, were already about long-past times.
They just don’t make nostalgia like they used to.
I got you. I was kind of taking your point and extending it a bit. Nostalgia is a big part of Christmas, perhaps beginning in the beginning/middle of the last century, but also continuing into today. The nostalgic songs of the 30-60s set a tone for Christmas that encourages us to look backwards and hang onto dreams of Christmases past. If that makes sense.
There’s nothing particularly Christmassy about that song; it’s just about riding in a sleigh in winter.
To all this I’d add that many, if not most, of those Tin Pan Alley type songs are relatively easy to sing. Everyone from grandparents to toddlers can sing along and smile.
Edited: I see this was already mentioned. Sorry!
In addition to all the good points made above, Christmas is the most ‘traditional’ time of year for those who celebrate it - you hang up your kids’ stockings because you did when you were a kid, and your parents did that for you because they did it when you were a kid, and so on.
Music, as played at home on a gramophone, then a record player, rather than live on a piano or whatever, only gradually became commonplace in the time period you’re talking about (note: I mean commonplace for all income brackets). Back then, not every single person would have a record player, but the person who hosted the family Christmas party would have or someone would have hauled one there. And what would they play? Crosby, et al.
Then their children would associate those songs with Christmas, and pass that tradition on to their children, and so we have it.
Well, along with all the other factors that others have mentioned. Being able to sing along to the songs is a big thing. Unlike traditional carols, which are pitched stupidly high, those gramophone/early record player songs were pitched so that everyone could have a go. It’s much easier to sing ‘White Christmas’ than ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!’ and you could think of tons more examples either side.
There have been a fair few songs added to the traditional repertoire since then, but we’ve become more secular. In the UK, most of the last ten years’ Christmas number ones haven’t had anything to do with Christmas other than being successful at Christmas.
A lot of traditional songs from Church became Christmas songs. O Come All Ye Faithful, O Holy Night, Silent Night etc. are often sung in Church’s year around.
I often wonder if kids today have the same love for Christmas songs. As a kid, we sang them a lot in choirs, caroling, and the music was on the radio constantly between Thanksgiving and New Years. It’s hard to find Christmas Songs on commercial FM anymore, and I haven’t seen any Christmas Carolers in 25 years. Still, I love Christmas more than any other time of the year.
An aside, but the lyrics of Fairytale of New York (from 1987) are printed in the latest edition of Ireland’s Own, a largely conservative, old-timey magazine. This song seems to have well and truly entered the canon here at least. Since downloads were counted it has also charted every year in Ireland and the UK around Christmas time.
Where I live, there’s at least one station that plays Christmas music 24/7 from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Unfortunately, it always seems to be the one that’s on where I work. (I don’t necessarily hate Christmas music. I just prefer small servings of it.)
We’ve occasionally had 24/7 Christmas stations, but that’s usually been when stations were changing ownership right around Christmas time. Still, we have steady Christmas songs in rotation on the Louisville Soft Pop/Easy Listening station, my city’s own pop music station, and the regional K-LOVE Christian pop affiliate, which occasionally also plays non-religious Christmas songs.
Even if we accept Jingle Bells as an x-mas tune (which I am tempted to do), we have nearly a century between it (1857) and White X-mas (1942). Wonder if there were any significant x-mas tunes written between them, and how far back beyond Jingle BElls you have to go to find the next one?
But, like I said, I neither read the book my kid read, nor conducted any individual research.
Some of the traditional religious carols aren’t as old as you think:
Away in a Manger, 1885
It Came Upon the Midnight Clear, 1849
O Little Town of Bethlehem, 1868
We Three Kings of Orient, 1863
Among non-religious songs, Winter Wonderland (1934) is the only one, other than Jingle Bells, that I can think of that pre-dates White Christmas. Of course, JB and WW are both actually “winter songs” that don’t mention Christmas by name. White Christmas appears to be the first non-religious popular song specifically dedicated to Christmas, and it certainly kicked off a cottage industry.
Thanks Freddy
Given those dates, it appears the pre-WC gap was not as significant as the author of that book desired to suggest.