I’ve written a lot about Christmas songs this season: here at The Spectator World, here at The Bulwark, and here, here, and here at this newsletter. I’ve still got a few assorted notes, it’s the last day of the Christmas season, and we finally got some snow here in Northern Virginia, so here goes one more, till this coming December!

One tidbit I came across in reading about Christmas songs didn’t quite fit into one of my articles, but stuck out to me nonetheless. It was this paragraph in the Wikipedia article for the song “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”:

Singer Johnny Mathis also covered the song on his Merry Christmas album in 1958, which was the #2 Christmas album of 1963 and 1964 as there were no Christmas album rankings prior to 1963. In December 1965, astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, while on Gemini 7, requested “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” be played for them by the NASA ground crew. Since the incarnation of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1958, cover versions by American singers Camila Cabello, Kelly Clarkson and Josh Groban are the only versions of the song to enter the chart.

The interesting thing here is that there were no Christmas album rankings before 1963. This is another bit of evidence that in some ways, the whole notion of “Christmas songs” is more a product of the American post-war era than one of the Christmas season per se. The sudden appearance of plentiful and affordable consumer, the phenomenon of Jewish assimilation, and the vague notion of Christmas as a sort of Cold-War-tinged patriotic celebration all contributed to the genre.

That being the case, it’s always interesting to me to look for little bits of cultural and economic information embedded in these songs. For example, turkey and pumpkin pie are identified as iconic Christmas foods. Today, turkey is dirt cheap, and Christmas dinner tends to be fancier than Thanksgiving dinner, rather than a throwback to it. It’s a little thing that shows how our country has gotten richer since the middle of the 20th century.

In a similar vein, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” talks about “presents on the tree.” That’s a reference to an old custom of hanging little decorations that doubled as small gifts, in households that were not affluent enough to cover a roll of fake snow with piles and piles of boxes. Today, “on the tree” sounds like a typo. It’s a forgotten bit of early 20th century or even 19th century Christmases.

I’ve written previously about how relatively few cheery, secular Christmas songs are written these days. So it’s interesting to me that Amazon is now producing a fair number of these tunes. Some are covers, such as Norah Jones’s “The Christmas Waltz” (a Frank Sinatra original.) But many are truly original: “Cozy Little Christmas” by Katy Perry, “Favorite Time of Year” by Carrie Underwood, “Pick Out a Christmas Tree” by Dan + Shay.

They’re kind of like Hallmark Christmas movies—they aren’t very good, and feel somewhat manufactured, but unlike most of the rest of the reasonably popular contemporary Christmas songs, they’re pretty lighthearted and similar in tone and content to the classics from the 20th century. I think that’s interesting—it’s a little bit of throwback, something that defines Amazon very much as an American company in a long tradition.

Anyway, that wraps up Christmas, and we’ll be back to some fun urbanism posts in the coming days!

Related Reading:

Election Nights and Ice Cream Cones

Why Not Put the Meat *In* the Bread?

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