Last Words On This Christmas
Assorted Christmas song commentary to end the season
I wanted to close out the Christmas season (today is the 12th day of Christmas) with a somewhat more in-depth follow-up of one of my Christmas pieces over at The Bulwark: this one about Amazon’s foray into original Christmas songs.
It was mostly a lightning-round review of a bunch of their original songs (i.e. that Amazon Music published) which, unfortunately, are pretty mediocre. They mostly just sound like someone took a song or category or songs and did a lackluster job of writing an imitation; like a less deft version of the Monkees imitating the early Beatles.
If anything, I was too nice to the Amazon originals in my piece, mostly because I like that they’re being made, even though they’re not very good. But what I want to come back to here is this more general bit:
One reason most of these songs—and a lot of recent Christmas songs in general—are not very good, aside from simply not sounding very nice: many either repeat the nostalgic tropes that have been done better, or they chuck out the earnest nostalgia of the classic Christmas canon but don’t do anything interesting with what’s left.
For a counterexample to that, consider the 1994 song that keeps bringing Mariah Carey more than $2 million every holiday season. “All I Want For Christmas Is You” did something interesting, and it may have been the first Christmas song to do it (well, okay, actually, not): rattle off all of the typical Christmas symbols (sleigh bells, reindeer, Santa, snow, etc.) for the purpose of emphasizing that those things were not what she wanted. That’s interesting! But a lot of newer Christmas songs with a tinge of cynicism have done exactly the same thing, and once you see the gimmick, it doesn’t work so well.
Time to put my (Christmas) cards on the table: In my opinion, the best of the post-1994 new Christmas songs is probably Ariana Grande’s 2014 “Santa Tell Me.” It’s perfectly produced and actually pleasant to listen to, which is more than you can say for a lot of these noisy Amazon songs. And its subject matter is mature but earnest (“I won’t have sex with a guy who won’t commit to me”), a combination our society could use so much more of. It’s something of an original thought for a mainstream Christmas song, and it is executed very well.
I actually had never thought about this point, about whether a song did something interesting or not, but it’s probably how the writers think about the lyrics, and it’s a good shorthand for evaluating a song. Obviously the execution and the music itself are important, but Christmas songs seem to lean more heavily on lyrics, I think.
Some songs are somewhat unique. “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”—about loneliness, but not romantic loneliness—was written for the soldiers at war during the holidays, and no other notable Christmas song does quite the same thing. The ones which capture the whimsy of childhood, about catching mommy kissing “Santa Claus” and wanting a hippopotamus, also haven’t been overdone.
Many do something similar though. So for example, you could say there’s a “holiday heartbreak” genre, which would include “Blue Christmas,” Baby Please Come Home,” and “Please Come Home for Christmas.” They’re different enough musically to all feel original, but you’d be hard pressed to write a fresh-sounding song nowadays that reduces to “I’m spending Christmas alone because my lover left me.”
Likewise, the “All I Want For Christmas Is You” trope—“I’m going to list all of the things associated with Christmas as a long way of explaining I don’t want any of them”—has been to death in at least two 1990s songs titled “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” and then recently by Kelly Clarkson in a pandemic-era Christmas song and (again) Kelly Clarkson and Ariana Grande.
Here’s the first few lines from the first “All I Want For Christmas Is You”:
Take back the holly and mistletoe
Silver bells on string
If I wrote a letter to Santa Claus
I would ask for just one thingI don’t need sleigh rides in the snow
Don’t want a Christmas that’s blue
Take back the tinsel, stockings, and bows
‘Cause all I want for Christmas is you
In other words, more or less the same as Mariah Carey’s lyrics, which I don’t think I need to reproduce.
Kelly Clarkson’s pandemic song, “Christmas Come Early,” includes lines like this, which you realize are doing the same “Christmas imagery to make a different point” thing:
I don’t need the snow, I’m already cold
Tired of the songs on the radio
I can’t hear the harmony or see the midnight clear
And here’s a verse from “Santa, Can’t You Hear Me,” the Clarkson/Grande collaboration:
Keep the snow and sleigh rides
Keep those silver bells
Keep the gifts beneath the tree
Give them to someone else
Keep that magic snowman
Keep those twinkly lights
Keep the reindeer
My heart already knows how to fly (mm)‘Cause all I ever wanted
Was nothing I got and
Santa, can’t you hear me?
Oh-oh, oh, oh-oh, oh
Obviously, songs kind of aping each other musically or lyrically is nothing new. But once you see the trope or gimmick, and when a song is as simple as a Christmas song, these imitators get kind of boring. So it’s actually quite difficult to write a good one nowadays.
That’s why I note Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me,” which is, as far as I’m aware, the first Christmas song to use its particular trope. I always thought it was a well-produced song, certainly way above the quality of most of the Amazon stuff. But I never quite realized that part of why it worked was that it had a fresh and, I guess you could say modern, idea, combined with something old-fashioned (as Frank Sinatra sang, Christmas is “When the world falls in love.”
I’ve been thinking about this sort of meta, “behind the curtain” stuff lately because I’ve been thinking about my own work more in that way: stepping back and trying to discern the craft behind the work more. (I wrote a long piece about that here.)
And Christmas songs are one of my mainstay topics, so this was fun. Happy Epiphany and happy new year!
Related Reading:
Revisiting The Modern Christmas Song Void
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