The Deleted Scenes - The Christmas Song Cultural Barometer
The Christmas Song Cultural BarometerSecular Christmas songs are really about their era's social arrangementsLast week, I had this article out at The Bulwark, titled “The Curious Rise of the Complicated Christmas Song”:
Also:
This is a thread I’ve been pulling at for several years. In 2018, for example, I wrote an article titled “The Best Christmas Songs Are All About The ’50s.” I noted, as I noted for The Bulwark, that the majority of popular Christmas songs—the ones you’ll hear on the radio, in stores, etc.—are from the postwar era/middle of the 20th century. I also noted some ways that the culture of the day was reflected in this body of popular Christmas songs. For example, I noted of one silly song:
These are little bits of cultural and sociological information that are preserved, like insects in amber, in these old cultural and commercial artifacts. I love doing this kind of thinking, although you can also overdo it. I wrote for The Bulwark:
Anyway, I received a few comments on the piece agreeing with its main thesis, which is that the appearance of new kinds of Christmas songs in the last few decades reflects a major shift in American society. You’ll see themes like divorce, singleness, and loneliness hinted at or mentioned outright in these lyrics. I mentioned in the article that the evolution of Christmas music suggests a sort of collective growing up in the American psyche. Here’s the kind of contrast I’m thinking of. Consider “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” These are two midcentury classics that capture a child’s wonder and excitement at Christmastime. There is nothing like this at all, that gets any radio play, from any recent decade. Instead, most modern Christmas songs are thematic adult songs, such as “Where Are You Christmas?” and “Grown up Christmas List.” It’s almost like the ’50s have grown up, like our whole country has grown older and losing that sense of magic. This is no simplistic nostalgia for that era, but I guess I figure we were doing something right if we could produce a body of cheerful, innocent songs that stay with us to this day. In any case, the later, more complex, less cheerful version of the holiday we now sing about wouldn’t exist without that simpler midcentury body of work before it. It’s part of a cultural evolution. You can’t have one without the other. We’re really talking about songs that use Christmas as a backdrop for the social and economic conditions of the day. So when people say that “Last Christmas,” for example, isn’t a real Christmas song, they’re not quite right. It is very much a Christmas song, for an era with more freedom of self-expression, and a little more loneliness too. Social card image credit Rick Harris/Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 Related Reading: The Japanese Arcade Game That Predicted “Tough on Crime” Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekend subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive of over 200 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this! You’re a free subscriber to The Deleted Scenes. For the full experience, become a paid subscriber. |
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