I love Christmas music. And I hate Christmas music. I love the hymns and carols of my childhood, and I hate when self-indulgent divas and bedroom-eyed Pop waifs wrangle and squawk and Autotune those classics into incomprehensible holiday balloon animal shapes.
I love hearing the Christmas songs of my youth when it’s cold enough to freeze your nose hairs and there’s snow in the air and on the ground and clinging to tree branches. I hate the Christmas songs of my youth when I’m in shorts and sandals and deciding which Halloween candy to give out this year. I love the songs of the season as the soundtracks to countless television specials that recur annually and I hate those same seasonal favorites as the soundtracks to countless advertisements selling everything from cars to insurance to fast food. Ba da bum bum bum, not lovin’ it.
I remember experiencing A Charlie Brown Christmas when it first aired in 1965. I was thrilled to see an animated version of my favorite comic strip; I had a dozen or more paperback Peanuts anthologies and I was smitten with Charles Schulz’s folksy yet somehow contemporarily sly humor delivered by children (and a beagle) who approached the problems of an adult world with innocence, faith, wisdom and determination. Linus never gave up his blanket, Snoopy and the Red Baron never got the best of one another and Charlie Brown never kicked the football — but he never quit trying.
Perhaps the most important thing I gleaned from that initial airing of A Charlie Brown Christmas, beyond its primary message of seeing past the glitz and commercial hucksterism of the season to find the holiday’s true meaning, was contained in the score by Jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi. The music he composed and performed as an adjunct to a children’s Christmas special was transcendently simple and yet emotionally complex.
As a result, the music that propels the cartoon’s action — beyond Guaraldi’s swinging version of “Oh Christmas Tree,” Schroeder’s myriad translations of “Jingle Bells” and the cast’s triumphant closing rendition of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” — really has nothing to do with Christmas, and yet it has become inextricably identified as Christmas music. On its own, the show’s ostensible theme, “Linus and Lucy,” is a spectacular piece of head-bobbing Jazz Pop, but its placement in one of the most beloved Christmas specials in television history has made it a holiday classic.
That may well be why I’m drawn to musical artists who take on the Herculean task of writing an original Christmas song. Some of my personal favorites are the ones that may only tangentially be about the holiday season. The first two lines of John Prine’s “Christmas in Prison” are a case in point: “It was Christmas in prison and the food was real good, we had turkey and pistols carved out of wood.” It’s really about loneliness and separation and hope and love, which makes it the perfect Christmas song, because who hasn’t felt all of those emotions during the holidays, sometimes all at once?
To be clear, every Christmas song that isn’t the result of an 18th-century Presbyterian choirmaster’s mash-up of an ancient melody and his own lyrics and arrangement as a way to celebrate the birth of Christ is an original song, and some have amazing histories. “Do You Hear What I Hear” was written as a plea for peace in the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Jose Feliciano released his Feliz Navidad album in November of 1970 but it sold poorly and received little airplay; the following year, radio programmers added the title track and it became a huge success, eventually placing in ASCAP’s top 25 of most played Christmas songs around the world.
Movies that have used the holiday as a setting have spawned any number of massively popular tunes: “Silver Bells” was featured in Bob Hope’s 1951 Christmas film The Lemon Drop Kid; Judy Garland nailed a tearfully optimistic version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in the 1944 movie Meet Me in St. Louis; and, arguably the most popular contemporary Christmas song of all time, Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” was the centerpiece of the Fred Astaire/Bing Crosby film Holiday Inn (the song won an Oscar in 1942 for Berlin), which was later loosely reimagined with Crosby, Danny Kaye and Rosemary Clooney and retitled after the song itself.
And for modern classics, few can match Mariah Carey’s stratospheric “All I Want for Christmas is You,” which hit Billboard‘s top 10 just a few weeks after its late 1994 release. It was featured in the 2003 Richard Curtis-written and directed Love Actually, and it topped Billboard‘s singles chart last year — 25 years after its original release.
One of the most prolific Christmas songwriters of all time was Johnny Marks, who composed “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” (based on the poem written by his brother-in-law), “Run Rudolph Run,” popularized by Chuck Berry, and “A Holly Jolly Christmas” and “Silver and Gold,” sung by Burl Ives for the 1964 stop-motion animation production of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Marks is also credited with writing Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” but renowned local musician Ric Hickey has an interesting tale about his songwriting father Ray Dean James pitching his song “Rock Around the Christmas Tree” to Nashville publishers in the late ’50s, so maybe that one has an asterisk next to Marks’ name.
At any rate, the songs you’ll find below will likely never rise to the level of the aforementioned classics, but they’re in constant rotation at our house every Christmas season. The only thing preventing their holiday immortality is a few billion plays and downloads, so won’t you please help? (Imagine a photo of a sad-eyed songwriter penned up behind a rusty chain link fence with Sarah McLachlan’s version of Joni Mitchell’s “River” playing in the background.) Play now, play often.
- “Christmas in Suburbia” – Martin Newell
- “Father Christmas” – The Kinks
- “Ain’t No Chimneys in the Projects” – Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings
- “Christmas Time All Over the World” – The Smithereens
- “Merry Xmas Everybody” – Cheap Trick
- “Yo Ho Ho” – Klark Kent (Police drummer Stewart Copeland)
- “Maybe This Christmas” – Ron Sexsmith
- “Christmas in Prison” – John Prine
- “Christmas Girl” – Boston Spaceships
- “Christmas with the Martians” – Dwight Twilley
- “Thanks for Christmas” – XTC
- “Naughty Naughty Children (Better Start Actin’ Nice)” – Grace Potter & the Nocturnals
- “Santa’s Gone on Strike” – Barnes & Barnes
- “Not Another Christmas Song” – Blink-182
- “I Want an Alien for Christmas” – Fountains of Wayne
- “I Wish It Was Christmas Today” – Julian Casablancas
- “Sock It to Me Santa” – Bob Seger
- “Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight Tonight)” – The Ramones
- “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day” – Roy Wood’s Wizzard
- “It’s Christmas Time Ebenezer” – The Len Price 3
- “Santa’s Coming Home” – Cocktail Slippers
- “All I Want for Christmas” – Timbuk 3
- “Home for the Holidays” – The dB’s
- “Spotlight on Christmas” – Rufus Wainwright
- “Underneath the Christmas Tree” – Bill Lloyd
- “Merry Xmas Everybody” – Slade
- “There’s No Lights on the Christmas Tree Mother, They’re Burning Big Louie Tonight” – The Sensational Alex Harvey Band
This article appears in The Holiday Issue.