I won’t bother you much on Christmas Day, but here’s a brief little something.

I want to call back one of my favorite Christmas pieces, on analyzing the lyrics of the secular Christmas song canon to discern what the built environment in which they take place would have looked like.

There’s a general old-fashioned theme to a lot of Christmas stuff: the display villages, the nostalgic recipes, the implied notion of simpler and more joyful times. And there’s an interesting tendency for Christmas imagery to be sort of urbanist. The zoning code wouldn’t allow many of the buildings in the Christmas villages, or at least their placements with regard to each other. My Trader Joe’s Advent calendar this year features a whimsical multistory townhouse-style apartment building and a three-story Trader Joe’s store with possibly walk-up apartments. Our Paper Source Christmas cards depict an old-fashioned village under a blanket of snow.

This stuff survives in our art and culture, but not in what we’re actually allowed to build in most places.

Anyway, I find it interesting to over-analyze how the enduring Christmas songs describe the built environment, and what their physical context is supposed to look like.

For example, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” (1952) and “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” (1953) both have the kid singing about going downstairs—meaning that, at a time when most houses were probably one-story, these kids lived in two-story homes, probably detached houses. The girl who wants the hippo even has a chimney and a two-car garage, in addition to a bedroom on a second floor. These are pretty affluent kids for the early 1950s!

Yet in “Frosty the Snowman” (1950) the kids go down to a village with a square, which is maybe a bit of anachronism by that time.

Etc., etc. Check out that piece, and give me your own fun or over-interpreted comment! That’s all for today. Merry Christmas!

Related Reading:

Crisis Christmas Songs

The Christmas Song Cultural Barometer

Christmas Song Trivia

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