The dearth of secular pre-1940 pop Christmas songs, though, is a little surprising. The US certainly had a thriving popular song industry during that era, cranking out pop songs about everything else–there was a dance, after all, named after Lindbergh.
The book your daughter read was probably White Christmas: The Story of an American Song, by Jody Rosen. I looked it up to see what the author had to say.
Rosen admits that the lack of pre-WC Christmas songs is surprising and even a little inexplicable. Irving Berlin himself wrote a couple of earlier Christmas songs that flopped. Rosen’s explanation, very much conjectural, is that Americans of that era associated Christmas with nostalgia for a still earlier era, in Victorian Britain. American pop Christmas stuff didn’t seem “authentic”.
Which makes the pre-1940 era sound a lot like today: New Christmas stuff has a hard time getting established because of nostalgia for the old stuff.
The question, then, is what was so unique about the 1940-1955 era, when people opened their minds and a boatload of new entries (White Christmas, Chestnuts, No Place Like Home, I’ll be Home for Christmas, Silver Bells, Merry Little Christmas, Rudolph, Frosty . . .) became holiday classics. World war is maybe the obvious answer.
So, who’s up for WW III to generate some new Christmas music? 