Last week, I had this article out at The Bulwark, titled “The Curious Rise of the Complicated Christmas Song”:

The brief, intense period of cultural production that gave us this part of the Christmas canon has remained with us for far longer than anyone would have guessed back in the 1950s. There’s obviously something nostalgic and comforting about these songs, even all these decades later.

Also:

If one can discern some of postwar America’s politics and societal arrangements from the classic Christmas canon—its near-universal if shallow Christianity, its larger families and more numerous marriages, even its largely pre-suburban urban forms and retail arrangements—we can do the same with the smaller but still notable body of popular contemporary Christmas songs. These songs feature subtle but dramatic changes in theme and complexity, and that in turn says something about how our society has changed and, in some ways, “grown up.”

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:

“Dominick the Donkey,” with lines like “A pair of shoes for Louie and a dress for Josephine / The label on the inside says they’re made in Brook-a-leen,” would not, needless to say, be written today. Read the comments on a YouTube video or newspaper article about the song, however, and you’ll find that Lou Monte was a beloved figure in Italian-American households. He was not viewed as a self-hating Italian, or as perpetuating harmful stereotypes, but rather as producing humorous and gentle self-parody and signifying, through his commercial success, that Italians had become part of the American family.

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:

We are also—and I suppose this article is a case in point—trained to deconstruct, interrogate, and problematize pop culture artifacts, especially those which uncritically celebrate normalcy.

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

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