I don’t think you have to be a believer to appreciate the holiday season when it rolls around each December. Christmas in particular is a fascinating study in contrasts, even for the secular-minded; it’s a time of generosity, family, good cheer and good basketball, but it can also be a deeply melancholy time, as if every honey-sweet ham you eat with your family is a reminder that someone out there is enjoying their Christmas meal at McDonald’s, or in a soup kitchen, or out of a flask, or not at all.
With all this emotional resonance and nuance, then, why is there such a spectacular lack of good Christmas music? That’s not to say that there aren’t good songs for the season, but if this really is the most wonderful time of the year, then the music could probably stand to reflect it a little better.
Oh, I can already hear people wailing and gnashing their teeth in time to “Walking in a Winter Wonderland.” But it seems a shame to me to filter the genuine emotions of the holiday, both good and bad, into, say, the lobotomized cheer of “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” or the maudlin melodrama of “The Christmas Shoes.” And no version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” has managed to make it seem any less creepy or overbearing, a “Blurred Lines” (Christmas edition!) for the Greatest Generation.
Not that younger generations are doing the holidays any favors. Even the short and sweet formula and classic style of “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)” has buckled under the weight of unnecessary covers. The Sex Pistols had more respect for tradition.
Then again, cover songs might be better than the alternative. When a top 10 list of the best modern Christmas songs could reasonably contain songs by Wham!, Band Aid, Mariah Carey and Greg Lake (of Emerson, Lake and Palmer fame), you’ve got a pretty sure sign that your holiday’s descended into Roman-style decadence. (Although that Greg Lake song, “I Believe in Father Christmas,” ain’t half bad.)
There is some great Christmas music out there, though, even when it doesn’t touch directly on the holidays. For the secular crowd, “Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!” manages to nail all the breezy charm that “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” fails so utterly at. Like much of the best Christmas music, though – including, as Chris Davis pointed out in last week’s cover story, Vince Guaraldi’s outstanding soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas – “Let it Snow!” is merely Christmas-adjacent. As my grandpa is fond of pointing out, traditional Christmas carols more than hold up their end of the bargain, too, whether it’s the pastoral serenity of “Silent Night” or the exultation of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.”
There are two modern Christmas songs – actual Christmas songs, rather than generic holidays songs or winter songs – that really hold up, however. The first is, of course, “White Christmas.” Irving Berlin may have written the song, but it is indelibly Bing Crosby’s, whose version captures the nostalgia, loneliness and deeply felt kindness that are such a part of the season. It’s just about the only Christmas song that rivals the utter beauty – both heartbreaking and life-affirming – of “Auld Lang Syne.”
“White Christmas” finds its more contemporary counterpart in the unlikeliest of places: the snaggle-toothed, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed Shane MacGowan and his Celtic punk band, the Pogues. At their finest, the Pogues always could seem like a swig of whiskey on a rainy winter’s night, but they approached the holiday directly on “Fairytale of New York,” featuring the crucial addition of the late, great Kirsty MacColl.
Beginning with an intro from MacGowan – somewhat shaky and overproduced, admittedly, although MacGowan really does sound like someone at the end of his tether, which probably didn’t involve much acting on his part – the song jumps between Christmases good and bad as it details the disintegration of a relationship. Driven by MacColl’s brassy lead in the duet and some of the most rollicking music in the band’s catalog, “Fairytale” makes the listener believe the promise of the young couple just as much as it does the bitterness of the old one.
Like much of the Pogues’ output, like Christmas itself, “Fairytale of New York” is a brilliant mix of the cynical and the sentimental, a Byronic hero of a song. Appreciating the highs means acknowledging the lows, too, and inside “Fairytale” is a moral fit for any holiday: It’s a cold world out there. Try to be warm.