💬 Weekly Question: What makes a great Christmas song anymore?
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Christmas songs are holiday mysteries, as far as I’m concerned. Some are spiritual, some are nostalgic, some are joyous. Some mix and match. Then, there’s our relationship to them, which is entirely subjective based on where we grew up and how we grew up. This doesn’t sound much different than most popular music except, unlike most popular music, very few new Christmas songs have managed to become standards over the past 50 years or so.
I have zero mathematical evidence to support this, but I’d wager 99% of the Christmas songs we listen to every season were composed between 1800 and 1970. What happened to kill the Christmas song? Was it the death of the big band era and the songwriters who fueled it and the musicals centered around its superstar performers? Was it the death of relentless optimism in the West that succeeded World War II? Let’s muse about this a bit, in any way you feel like, with the following question as a prompt:
What makes a great Christmas song anymore?
By the way, if you want my vote for a great new Christmas song, look no further than Elton John and Ed Sheeran’s “Merry Christmas”, which manages to be nostalgic, joyous, and even romantic as it subtly calls for us to come together and be grateful for surviving a global pandemic. I adore it.
A Fairytale of New York. It's profane, it's sad, and it's hopeful about how you can maybe make things better with some effort and some help even if it recognizes how hard that actually is. Very Christmas to me.
Last Christmas will always be my favourite song for the Holiday Season. I think what makes a Christmas song is a simple upbeat style mixed in with some sort of classical orchestral stuff. In Last Christmas you literally hear sleigh bells as was also the case in All I Want For Christmas is You. I think the combination of these sounds, very calm pop music style/lyrics, with more traditional and season appropriate instrumentation create the best Christmas songs.