#winter misery

Hey! Y’all ready for some motherfuckin CHRISTMAS MUSIC? That’s right, we’re approaching the tail end of November so it’s time for the same 40 Christmas songs to be played on every radio station. But, like, let’s talk about that. Yes, it’s repetitive and pretty homogenous, but that’s true of any song that gets a lot of play over the span in a few months. Remember last year when Old Town Road was in the top 40 for seventeen weeks? Christmas music is around for half that long, and there’s so much more of it. Besides, the two largest offenders are major retailers and radio stations, and we live in a world where radio is functionally obsolete and we probably won’t be doing much shopping anyway. In the year of 2020, is Christmas music really that bad? Well, that’s a matter of circumstance or opinion. Yes, we all have much bigger issues, but I’d like to take a deeper dive into the world of Christmas music. Fortunately for me, Wikipedia (something something not proper academic source w/e w/e who cares) has already compiled a table of the 30 most played Christmas songs of 2015.

While that is the chart for just one year, I compared it to listings from a few other years and the songs are largely the same. And also… just look at it. These are 100% the same songs that were played in 2007 and 2010 and 2013 and 2018 and will go on to be played this year… with one anomaly. 2015 is the first year All I Want for Christmas is You made the top 30, despite being written more than two decades previous in 1994.

If you take a look at the years the other songs were released, you may start to understand what took Mariah Carey so long to make the list. Of the 30 songs on the list, only 5 of them were written in the 70s or later, with All I Want for Christmas as the second most recent song on the list (and more importantly, the most recent original composition). A vast majority of the songs were written in the 30s-60s, and have become an integral part of American Christmas because… uh… why, exactly?

Randall Munroe had a hypothesis that he expressed in his popular webcomic XKCD:

He’s likely on to something here. Songs get popular because… that’s what they do. As the baby boomers grew up, they wanted to feel nostalgic with the songs they grew up with, and because there were so many of them, their childhood songs got requested on the radio more and more, and then a new cohort of children grow up with those Christmas songs too. What’s popular goes on to become more popular. This in turn makes it harder for new songs to break in: there’s new Christmas singles every year, and some of them do get radio play, but with this endless wall of “essential Christmas songs” it’s impossible for anything new to break in.

But let’s go back to the original question: so what? There’s traditions that society at large does every holiday season: stores decorate themselves with red and green, cities hang up lights, networks play Christmas specials endlessly. Hearing these same songs is just one of those traditions. The problem is that blindly replaying these same few songs doesn’t leave room for anything better to come through.

For the other ten months of the year, songs compete with each other for radio play and for attention on streaming services. It’s far from an outright meritocracy, but on some level it’s relatively fair: songs trend on the top few spots while they’re popular, then when people get tired of it or start to like something else more, the popular song fades away and the new song gets popular. It has some of the same issues, popular songs receive a burst of popularity by virtue of being popular, but the culture around Christmas music takes it to the extreme: the same few dozen songs get popular every year, and if the label still owns the rights to it then it pumps their pockets full of money and blocks anything new from coming.

This would, theoretically, be a good place to end. I give some generic platitude about not holding on so tight to established traditions and listening to something different this Christmas, link a playlist of winter-sounding Nintendo music, and we move on. But what’s the fun in that? We haven’t even analyzed the content of the songs yet!

When I was originally planning this assignment, I was going to sort each different song into categories like “romance” “winter weather” “commercialism”, etc. Fortunately, Wikipedia did that for me! The largest category is, fittingly, “traditions”. These songs include It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Blue Christmas, and Home for the Holidays. For the most part, this seems like a catch-all category to encompass anything that the other categories don’t include, songs that are about Christmas as a concept. Interestingly enough, these are almost exclusively (with only one exception) from the 50s and 60s, a sort of “second era” of Christmas music. These songs essentially look back at the 30s and 40s songs and lift themes from those to make quintessential Christmas songs.

This category isn’t especially interesting, so let’s move on to “Mythical”, so named because the songs within create or perpetuate the mythology around Christmas- Santa Claus and his flying sleigh delivering presents. These songs are essentially oral traditions passed down through music about “the magic of Christmas”. Remember that phrase for later.

What I’m especially interested in examining are the categories “seasonal” and “celebratory”. Seasonal songs are simple, they’re (usually) upbeat songs written about how nice it is that winter’s here. Most commonly they’re about snow, cold weather, and going inside to get out of the cold weather. If you were in orchestra, band, or choir from fourth grade into middle school, you’re probably familiar with most of these.

Celebratory songs are the most interesting- they’re about celebrating the joy of Christmas, and by nature of becoming part of the Christmas Experience, they have essentially turned Christmas into a celebration of itself. The omnipresence of these songs ensures that every radio station and storefront is full of the celebration of Christmas.

“So what?” you may be thinking. “Is little miss Grinch here gonna complain about that too?” Well, kind of. For the next few months, the joy of Christmas is going to be literally fucking everywhere, and most of you are probably going to be pretty happy about that. I’m pretty happy about that- Christmas takes place during the literal darkest days of the year, just four days after the winter solstice, and I certainly enjoy having all the decorations to light up the darkness. I even enjoy some of the common Christmas songs to an extent, and because they’ve been around forever they can certainly make me feel nostalgic.

But Christmas doesn’t just spread joy, it demands it. If you’re miserable around Christmas, people begin to think there’s something wrong with you. More importantly, when someone’s unhappy and everyone else is joyous, they begin to think there’s something wrong with them. People suffering from depression or seasonal affective disorder, people who are stressed out and beaten down by life, people who have bad memories associated with winter or Christmas aren’t just going to be unhappy during the season, they’re going to feel alienated by the world around them demanding joy. YouTuber Renegade Cut said it best: “nothing is more miserable than being around happy people”.

In fact, he said most things better than I can, so I highly recommend taking a few minutes to watch his video about misery in the time of Christmas to get a sense of what I’m talking about here.

Again, if Christmas and its associated traditions make you happy, that’s good. We can all use some happiness right now, and we should seek it out where we can. But we’re living in the middle of a pandemic, we’re on the tail end of a horrific presidency, those of us demanding social change have been shut down time and time again, many of us may be spending Christmas without family for the first time. If you’re not happy on Christmas, that’s okay too. There’s nothing wrong with you if it doesn’t make you happy. Don’t try to force it. Stay inside and listen to something somber if that’ll help. Sadness is an important emotion to feel sometimes.

And for those of you who want something wintry that doesn’t ask you to celebrate, here’s what I’m listening to as my kickoff to the Holiday season.

Links used:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_music#United_States - most played Christmas songs.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tradition.png - xkcd comic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfAJN5vAYmA - Merry Christmas from Renegade Cut