Christmas is undeniably important. Cultures have been celebrating festivals this time of year for millennia. More suicides, more breakups, more overdoses, and more family feuds happen during Christmas than during any time of the year. It’s a time of year when stuff happens and emotions run wild. Of course people are going to write some songs about it – and of course people are going to listen to them.
Does that mean I love every Christmas song? No, a lot of them are painfully, unforgivably terrible. But I love the idea of Christmas songs, and I love what they can be. They can tap into one of last remaining cultural experiences that we all share, and use it to say things about life, and love, and death in legitimately meaningful way. Christmas is a personal thing, meaning different things to different people. Everyone has their own memories and experiences: getting the present they really wanted, their first Christmas without a valued loved one, the first Christmas away from home. It’s a personal thing – but it’s personal thing shared by millions worldwide, and a good Christmas song can say a hundred things to a hundred different people and can be relevant to all of them.
This a time of reflection. It’s cold at Christmas, people stay inside and keep warm. It’s times like this,when your hectic schedule relaxes that you really have time to appreciate music. When I’m home this Christmas I’ll be able to spend time listening to the music I love, having had my eardrums spared the torment of too frequent Willow visits. Christmas and music are really interconnected and inseparable, feeding off each other.
If you expand your knowledge of Christmas songs beyond Wham and X – Factor you will find yourself surrounded by unknown riches. Bands have been taking their hands to the institution of the Christmas song for decades; and they have produced some true jewels. “Feels like Christmas” by Low manages to use the metaphor of Christmas to produce some truly poignant lyrics. Bright Eye’s wonderful, stripped down arrangement of “Blue Christmas” perfectly captures a sense of yuletide melancholy. Though by now a cliché, “Fairytale of New York”, with its expletive filled, and brutally honest lyrics about regret and broken dreams has brought joy to millions in the form of many a drunken sing along, This may in fact be the most lasting testament to the power of the Christmas song.
Christmas songs shouldn’t just be considered a horrible novelty or some unfortunate cultural hangover gnawing at us all. But as a wonderful sub-genre: sometimes bizarre, sometimes embarrassing and sometimes great. Rather than sweeping them under the carpet as a naff seasonal unavoidability, they should be embraced. In a time when Christmas is essentially a commercial shill, stripped of most its original religious intent – it might be all we have to keep us together.