# Why are 1940s/early 1950s Christmas songs so popular? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [December 20, 2009, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-1940s-early-1950s-christmas-songs-so-popular/521909 "2009-12-20T01:12:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a587f6/32.png) [@Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freddy_the_Pig)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2009, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-1940s-early-1950s-christmas-songs-so-popular/521909/41 "2009-12-28T22:28:41Z")
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](http://www.amazon.com/White-Christmas-Story-American-Song/dp/0743218752), 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? 😃 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-1940s-early-1950s-christmas-songs-so-popular/521909.md?page=2)