It is estimated that there are more than 5,000 holiday songs, carols, ditties and tunes, and though you probably feel as if you have heard every one of them in the last few weeks, it’s likely that you have only heard about 4,920. Still, holiday music comes at us like a ferocious blizzard at this time of year. Two local radio stations are devoting their entire playlists to holiday hits. They pour from speakers in stores, elevators, hotel bars and your home sound system. The CD racks are filled with tunes in astonishing variety; it seems as if everybody but Oprah and Mike Ditka have special holiday CDs on the shelves.
Just how much can we take?
“There’s really no limit,” says William E. Studwell, a retired professor and the country’s leading expert on holiday music. “For a month we are saturated with everything from Handel’s ‘Messiah’ to ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.’ It’s everywhere. In TV commercials, on the radio, in every store, from people playing on street corners. Yet the vast majority of us never get overwhelmed by it, never tire of it. In some ways it helps us fight off the bleakness of winter’s approach.”
So grab a glass of eggnog, slap your favorite holiday song or carol on your CD player and read on.
20TH CENTURY BOOM
In 1932, a couple of songwriters named J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie sat down and wrote a tune called “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town,” lighting the fuse for an amazing explosion of songs that would become holiday standards.
Santa Claus is Comin’
To Town (1932)
I Wonder As I Wander (1933)
Winter Wonderland (1934)
Carol of the Bells (1936)
The Little Drummer Boy (1941)
Happy Holiday (1942)
White Christmas (1942)
I’ll Be Home for Christmas (1943)
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (1944)
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! (1945)
All I Want for Christmas
Is My Two Front Teeth (1946)
Here Comes Santa Claus (1946)
The Christmas Song (1946)
Sleigh Ride (1948/1950)
A Marshmallow World (1949)
Rudolph the Red-Nosed
Reindeer (1949)
Frosty the Snowman (1950)
Silver Bells (1951)
It’s Beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas (1951)
There are many theories about why this period proved so fruitful for holiday songs.
Studwell says that “during stressful times, artistic creation seems to always shine through.”
Ron Pen, a music professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, adds, “This was a time, in the face of a depression and world war, in which people wanted desperately to cling to or have evoked the notions of home and family.”
EARLIER GOLDEN AGES
Gregorian chants and mystery plays of the Medieval period (600-1450) were the first to celebrate Christmas in song, Pen says. One of the oldest chants still regularly sung is the 13th Century “Veni Emmanuel” (“Oh Come, Oh Come Emmanuel”). The Renaissance and Baroque eras (1450-1750) spawned great quantities of Christmas music, due to the central importance of religion coupled with the rise of humanism.
Pen notes that Christmas was not widely celebrated in England or colonial America during the times of Puritan dissent, and some of the carols, such as “Remember, O Thou Man” lingered on the sinful condition of humanity that necessitated the Nativity.
The English Restoration returned the Christmas revels and produced a whole host of merry carols. In America, some of our earliest New England composers, such as Daniel Read, wrote lively Christmas tunes such as “Sherburne.”
The German Reformation created the congregational chorale, which led to J. S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Bach’s contemporary, George Frederick Handel, composed the oratorio “Messiah” with its “Hallelujah” chorus representing the epitome of Christmas majesty.
The Victorian era in the mid-19th Century re-invented Christmas as both a sacred and domestic holiday, Pen says. “Christmas revels had gotten rough, with wassailers traveling from house to house demanding food and drink. This practice has been tamed as ‘caroling,’ and wassails, such as ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas,’ are a pale shadow of the wassails that threatened nobility with bodily harm.”
The Victorian Christmas ushered in our modern Christmas observance—the tree came into vogue and gift-giving became widespread. Victorian carols could be sentimental in spirit, such as “Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem,” or they could be full of pomp like “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.”
WHO ARE THESE GUYS?
Studwell fell in love with Christmas carols as a boy singing in a Baptist choir in Stamford, Conn. In 1972, while principal cataloguer of Founders Memorial Library at Northern Illinois University, he wrote a pamphlet on “Oh, Holy Night” as a gift for a family member and began to devote much of his academic and personal life to seasonal music. He has written four books on the subject, including “Christmas Carols: A Reference Guide,” contributed more than 50 articles to journals and given thousands of interviews. Recently retired and living in Bloomington, Ind., Studwell is particularly fond of a tune called “Christmas Time Swing.”
“A lot of what makes a standard is combining the right song, the right performer and the right time,” he says. “If I can dream a bit, I would love to have heard ‘Christmas Time Swing’ performed by the Glenn Miller Orchestra.”
Pen grew up on Chicago’s Gold Coast and fell in love with holiday music “gathered around the piano in my family house. It was quite the Victorian scene, with my mother, Yvonne, and aunt Marilyn harmonizing.”
He received his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in 1987, where he teaches and does research on early folk music. He once taught in Chicago and lived in a small apartment, made even smaller by the fact that Pen kept his Christmas tree up year-round.
Asked to name his favorite holiday tunes, Pen picks “In the Bleak Mid-Winter” and “White Christmas.” His least favorite? “I don’t have a least favorite,” he says. “I love ’em all.”
A CAROL IS NOT A SONG
Carols were medieval songs in English or Latin with a repeated refrain after every stanza, says Pen. “While there were carols for other seasons, by the Renaissance it came to refer to Christmas generally. A carol has the Nativity as its focus. It may use a tale such as ‘Good King Wenceslas’ to shed light on the Nativity. Or it may be ‘The Boar’s Head,’ which celebrates the customary revels of Christmas. But a carol will always emphasize the Christ in Christmas. A holiday song looks at the holiday context of Christmas in a secular way: winter celebrations, home for the holidays, family, Santa Claus, presents. The 20th Century gave us most of our holiday songs.”
THE ECUMENICAL ERA
French composer Adolphe Adam, the man who wrote “O, Holy Night” in the early 1800s, was Jewish, but it wasn’t until the 20th Century that Jewish songwriters came to dominate the holiday music scene. It’s not hard to understand why, since so many of the leading songwriters of the Tin Pan Alley era, which lasted roughly from 1920 until about 1965, were Jewish, turning out hundreds of tunes on every conceivable subject. Inevitably, they got around to Christmastime.
Many composers were spurred by affection for their new country and its freedoms, and by the desire to assimilate into the new culture even as they celebrated it. These holiday songs, like those written by non-Jews in the 20th Century, highlighted the secular side of the season and its characters, rather than the religious aspect.
Once asked how a Jew could write a Christmas song, Irving (“White Christmas” and, lest we forget, “Easter Parade”) Berlin is said to have responded: “I know how. I wrote it as an American.”
A ‘WHITE CHRISTMAS’ STORY
Though it would win the Academy Award for Best Song in the 1942 film “Holiday Inn,” “White Christmas” was first performed by Bing Crosby on his radio show, “The Kraft Music Hall,” on Christmas Day 1941. It was 18 days after Pearl Harbor, and Armed Forces radio soon started playing the song on its network, making it a hit long before the movie came out.
After writing the song, Berlin reportedly told his publishers that it was “not only the best song I ever wrote, but the best song anybody ever wrote.”
That’s debatable, of course, but its popularity is not: more than 500 versions in 25 languages and a recently published book, ” ‘White Christmas’: The Story of an American Song” by Jody Rosen (the name as published has been corrected in this text).
Berlin wrote “White Christmas” while in Los Angeles, composing for the movies. The original first verse of the song was so specific to that clime that he and his publishers decided to drop it (although it was later recorded by a number of artists, among them Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond and The Carpenters) (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
The sun is shining
The grass is green
The orange and palm trees sway.
I’ve never seen such a day
In Beverly Hills, LA.
But it’s December the 24th
And I am longing to be up North.
THE TOP TUNES
Every year ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) issues its list of the 25 all-time most-performed holiday songs. This is the latest:
1) The Christmas Song (Robert Wells, Mel Torme)
2) White Christmas (Irving Berlin)
3) Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town ( J. Fred Coots, Haven Gillespie)
4) Winter Wonderland (Felix Bernard, Richard B. Smith)
5) Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (Ralph Blane, Hugh Martin)
6) Sleigh Ride (Leroy Anderson, Mitchell Parish)
7)Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Johnny Marks)
8) Little Drummer Boy (Katherine K. Davis, Henry V. Onorati, Harry Simeone)
9) I’ll Be Home for Christmas (Walter Kent, Kim Gannon, Buck Ram)
10) Silver Bells (Jay Livingston, Ray Evans)
11) Jingle Bell Rock (Joseph Carleton Beal, James Ross Boothe)
12) Blue Christmas (Billy Hayes, Jay W. Johnson)
13) Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! (Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne)
14) Feliz Navidad (Jose Feliciano)
15) Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree (Johnny Marks)
16) Frosty the Snowman (Steve Nelson, Walter E. Rollins)
17) I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus (Tommie Connor)
18) It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year (Edward Pola, George Wyle)
19) A Holly Jolly Christmas (Johnny Marks)
20) Here Comes Santa Claus (Gene Autry, Oakley Haldeman)
21) Carol of the Bells (Peter J. Wilhousky, M. Leontovich)
22) It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas (Meredith Willson)
23) Chipmunk Song (Ross Bagdasarian aka David Seville)
24) Santa Baby (Joan Ellen Javits, Phillip Springer)
25) We Need A Little Christmas (Jerry Herman)
TWO SONGS THAT WON’T MAKE THE LIST
“Frosty the Pervert” and “Rudolph the Deep Throat Reindeer,” two cuts from the 1998 CD released by Party on Parody Productions. It was titled “Matt Rogers’ Rated X Mas.” The owners of the copyrights to some of America’s most popular holiday songs sued a musical production company claiming it used the copyrighted works without authorization. The suit was settled in their favor, damages were paid and the CD was pulled from circulation.
WHY SOME MUSIC JUST DOESN’T WORK
Studwell: “Rock music–not to mention rap, R&B and jazz–with its heavy beat and emphasis on sexual love does not go together well with the sentiments of Christmas and the gentle rhythms of the carols. Only a couple of songs that could be classified as rock and written after 1955–‘Jingle Bell Rock,’ written 100 years after the original ‘Jingle Bells,’ ‘Blue Christmas’ and ‘Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree’–could be called standards.”
Pen: “The hard edge of rock does not seem to mesh well with the domestic and nostalgia-laced soul of Christmas. All the production seems to distract from the simple message of the story of a childbirth in poverty.”
WHY WE LOVE HOLIDAY MUSIC
“[It] helps to balance the bleakness of winter approaching, but there’s more,” says Studwell. “The music, in addition to its artistry, conspires with other elements that affect the mind and senses–the lights, the colors, the tastes of food, even the feel of snow–to make us laugh and think, to feel warm and happy, to bind us all together.”
Pen gets the last word: “A great Christmas carol is one that contributes a fresh and personal look at an impenetrable mystery. It is a union of text and tune that is vitally intertwined, like mistletoe on an old oak tree. It is a poem that relates the miracle of childbirth [and] speaks directly to our hearts. It is a cherished heirloom that can be brought out of storage annually, dusted off and paraded for several weeks while still seeming like a breath of fresh air. It is tender without being maudlin, sweet without being cloyingly sentimental.”
