It’s something of a tradition for me to write an article about Christmas songs, or Christmas and American popular culture, every year. I’ve been doing it since 2016, when I first started working in magazines and digital publishing. Take a look at that first one, where I commented on a short science fiction story from the 1950s about a future America in which the religious meaning of Christmas is forgotten and shopping and decorating is in full swing by autumn. Huh.

Yesterday, I had this piece out at The Spectator World, a fun look at a bunch of second-tier or completely forgotten Christmas songs whose language and imagery didn’t take hold in the popular imagination:

Ah, Christmastime, the season for pheasant dinners, fancy ties, the land of Toyland from which you can never return, the time of year when everyone falls in love, when snowmen fly away to Snowland to become Eskimos, and when kids run around crying “dickory dock!”

Right?

In the same spirit, today’s post is a light one with some more fun facts/observations about popular Christmas songs.

Here’s one: As far as I am aware, there are only two Christmas songs that mention both God and Santa. Do you know any songs that do this?

The two I know are “Here Comes Santa Claus” by Gene Autry and “Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays” by NSYNC, of all people. As for any song that mentions Jesus and Santa, I’m not aware of any; I suppose that would be like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters. (That NSYNC song, by the way, has a little instrumental bit that reminds me of this piece of music from the 1990s video game Donkey Kong Country 2. They’re both from the same era, and they both sound like it.)

Here’s an interesting Reddit thread about the meaning of the line “Well, tonight thank God it’s them instead of you” in “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” It’s become fashionable to assume that that line was meant literally. While the whole song comes off poorly today, of course it’s meant ironically.

I dislike how modern covers of “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” make a grammatical mistake in the lyrics. In the original, Burl Ives sings “I don’t know if there’ll be snow.” That contraction sounds and looks a little awkward. But today, people sing it as “I don’t know if they’ll be snow.” I don’t know, will they?

It’s interesting how what we call the “Christmas canon”—at least the secular, pop culture part of it that I write about—has evolved to the point where there are different versions of a lot of the songs. The upbeat, jazzy Jackson Five version of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” became the dominant style, copied by Bruce Springsteen, which in turn inspired many lesser covers.

Some folks have updated the lyric in “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” from “presents on the tree”—a reference to an old rural or working-class tradition of hanging small, modest gifts directly on the tree that doubled as decorations—to “presents under the tree” or “by the tree,” as that older cultural reference has become obscure.

“I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” both picked up intros somewhere along the way, which perhaps serve to abstract their original cultural contexts a little bit.

Some versions of “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” end with “and the thing that will make them ring…” while others conclude with “and the prettiest sight to see….” There are two versions of “Frosty the Snowman” lyrics. Rudolph has also gotten some new lyrics. The Ray Conniff Singers added an extra humorous line about his nose, and Jack Johnson added a stanza where Rudolph shames the other reindeer for only cheering him once it became convenient and popular.

All of this is trivia. But it’s more than that too. We’re seeing a body of specific, copyrighted works with specific authorship meld into a sort of public domain—something more diffuse and informal. Hey, it’s kind of like what I wrote about yesterday, on the phenomenon of brand-centric architecture getting reused or adapted by later tenants.

I’ll probably be doing a sort of part 2 to this post, with some more trivia and a link to a second Christmas article I’ve got coming out soon. Stay tuned, and merry Christmas!

Social card image credit Rick Harris/Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

Related Reading:

The Spider Skeleton

The Christmas Clock

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