NEW YORK CITY: Mariah Carey performs during the opening show of Mariah
Carey: All I Want For Christmas Is You at Beacon Theatre on December 5,
2016 in New York City. (Photo by Jeff Kravitz / FilmMagic / Getty)
What we think of as “Christmas songs”—not hymns or traditional
carols, but those secular ditties that paint images of the holiday
season and serve as a backdrop to Christmas shopping—tend to be happy,
lighthearted, somewhat saccharine tunes. Most hail from the middle of
the twentieth century—an era of radio and records. They feature kids,
families, Christmas dinners, decked-out trees, and classic downtowns.
They appear to have no point to make, no axe to grind.
Yet their largely postwar vintage is pertinent. Many of them mix
consumerism with the Christmas season, having been written at a time
when economic growth, patriotism, and Christianity were powerfully
linked, if not fused together—and often even bent in a Cold War
direction.
It’s tempting, but not quite correct, to see the secular Christmas
canon as neutral. Yes, in some ways these older songs are simplistic.
They reflect, and assume, a level of stability, cohesion, and emotional,
cultural, and religious conformity that no longer obtains. Indeed, the
secular Christmas canon itself owes much to Jewish songwriters (Irving
Berlin, Johnny Marks, Mel Tormé, and many others) who squared the circle
of celebrating Christmas by writing about its atmosphere, its civic and
familial meaning. Far from diluting the holiday, they broadened it, and
helped make it—I would argue for better, although some believe for
worse—something American.
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. Perhaps they are vestiges of the sort of society that many of us
miss in some ways, even those of us who would never admit it.
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.”
Consider, for example, the holiday heartbreak genre, represented most
notably by “Blue Christmas,” and the early Sixties pair “Please Come
Home for Christmas” and “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” They all
feature separated couples, and a hope for reconciliation before the big
holiday. They make no point or commentary beyond that.
In 1984, with “Last Christmas,” something interesting happened. For
possibly the first time, a Christmas song featured a lonely, single
person. This was not a one-off, but the beginning of a new thematic
trend.
Mariah Carey’s wildly popular 1994 hit “All I Want for Christmas Is
You” wishes for a relationship that doesn’t yet exist. Kelly Clarkson’s
2013 “Underneath The Tree,” while happy and upbeat, also refers to years
of lonely, gray Christmases. “You Make It Feel Like Christmas,” a 2017
Gwen Stefani-Blake Shelton duet, is also cheerful and upbeat, although
the happy couple in the song came through some hard times: “Thought I
was done for / Thought that love had died . . . I never thought I’d find
a love like this.”
Now here’s a striking fact: “Last Christmas,” “All I Want for
Christmas Is You,” and “Underneath the Tree” are nearly the only entries
in the secular Christmas canon in the last forty years. In other words,
while Christmas songs are still recorded in large numbers, very few
modern entries appear on mainstream radio during the holidays, or would
even be recognizable to the average person.
Another thematic shift took place around the same time: The
appearance of songs which use Christmas as a backdrop to make some
deeper political or social argument. John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is
Over)” from 1971 was an early example. (It’s sort of the ponderous polar
opposite of Paul McCartney’s vacuous “Wonderful Christmastime” from
1980.) You could also trace this genre to 1984, with “Do They Know It’s
Christmas?”
As with the “single person looking for love” genre, the moping
political genre of Christmas songs also came into its own in the 1990s
and in the new millennium. “Where Are You Christmas,” from 2000, may
have been written for that year’s live-action How the Grinch Stole Christmas,
but the lines “My world is changing, I’m rearranging / Does that mean
Christmas changes too?” also suggest such once-invisible themes as
divorce and mid-life crisis. Or consider 1990’s “Grown-Up Christmas
List,” a reflection on growing up and realizing the hollowness of
consumerism and the depth of suffering in the world.
Then there’s Kelly Clarkson’s pandemic Christmas song, released in October, “Christmas Come Early.”
“Candles burning out at both ends,” she sings, combining a trope of
holiday imagery with an idiom for desperation. “I don’t need the snow,
I’m already cold / Tired of the songs on the radio,” she continues,
breaking the fourth wall by alluding to the tired old-time Christmas
playlist.
These changes in the
nature of the canon of secular Christmas music reflect a profound shift
away from the arrangements and attitudes of the middle of the twentieth
century. As far as the first thematic shift is concerned, the average
age of marriage has risen; divorce is more common; and young people tend
to spend a long interlude between leaving their parents’ house and
starting their own household.
As far as the second shift, we are more sensitive today to those who
do not celebrate Christmas or for whom the holidays can be stressful or
depressing times—all the more so because of the atmosphere of compulsive
cheerfulness. We are encouraged, far more than in the postwar era, to
express ourselves, to buck social norms, and to think socially and
politically about things like working conditions, wages, and economic
inequality. 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.
Nothing in the classic collection of Christmas songs reflects or
acknowledges any of this. It was inevitable that holiday entertainment
would catch up.
In a sense, then, American society has grown out of that classic
Christmas canon, even if we still feel nostalgic for it. (Keeping in
mind that many of those songs were themselves art about nostalgia, and
that implies that we are to some extent nostalgic about… nostalgia.)
In some ways, this all suggests that America has matured. Many
midcentury Christmas songs resemble advertising jingles: peppy, easy
melodies—“Home for the Holidays” could have been a General Motors
jingle. It’s fashionable to laugh at those Fifties ads of women nearly
fainting over new refrigerators and vacuum cleaners. But after twenty
years of the Depression and the world war, those things must have seemed
incredible.
It would be wrong, or at least incomplete, to blame these cultural
shifts on cultural leftism or on the Sixties. They may even be
inevitable as countries become more affluent and more diverse. One of my
wife’s “aunts,” an older woman who grew up in China, once suggested
much the same thing about her country. Chinese television had gotten
more complicated, she told us; the shows dealt with more
sensitive topics, and had moved beyond two-dimensional, party-line
portrayals of things like family life and work.
This reflected, she mused, that the country was growing up—becoming
freer in some ways, collectively reaching a cultural and economic point
where such complexities could be more openly discussed. This is an
anecdote. But I suspect the evolution of our Christmas music tells a
similar story of the United States.
The irony is that for all our economic growth, it is not clear that
we are any happier for it, even if we are freer. Perhaps that is for the
better. Or perhaps, when Auntie Mame sang in 1966 that “I’ve grown a
little leaner, grown a little colder, Grown a little sadder, grown a
little older,” she was merely half a century early.
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