Eight Popular “Christmas Songs” That Aren’t Actually Christmas Songs
Every year the holiday season becomes longer. By the time Christmas actually rolls around, you’ve already heard more than your fair share of Christmas music – it’s almost impossible to avoid. And each holiday playlist looks almost exactly the same as the last; if you search for “Christmas music” on any platform, you’ll get similar results, including a bunch of songs that have become closely associated with the holiday but aren’t actually Christmas songs except by association.
Sometimes these non-Christmas songs make sense because their lyrical imagery is entirely wintery and it’s easy to see the holidays implied in them. But if you stop for a moment to really think about these lyrics, it usually becomes pretty obvious what is a real Christmas song and what isn’t . Here are eleven people who snuck into the holiday season under false pretenses.
“Winter’s Tale”
A regular on holiday playlists, “Winter Wonderland” began life as a poem written by Richard Bernhard Smith while he was recovering from a bout of tuberculosis in 1934. Isolated in a sanatorium due to his highly contagious disease, Smith spent his time entering advertising writing competitions. jingles for companies. One day, waking up to a fresh snowfall, he wrote words that later became holiday classics. In the same year, music was written for it, and it instantly became a hit, but there is not a word about Christmas, and the song was never intended to be a holiday song at all.
“Bells”
The song “Jingle Bells”, written in 1857 by James Pierpont, was originally titled “One Horse Open Sleigh”. Technically this is a holiday song – it was originally intended to be a Thanksgiving theme tune . The full version of the song is actually quite naughty: it tells the story of young men racing on a sled, trying to pick up girls, and getting into a brutal accident. It’s essentially a call to sow wild oats while you can, so it’s surprising that it’s become a Christmas classic.
“Jingle Bell Rock”
Written by a couple of middle-aged executives and recorded by an up-and-coming country music star named Bobby Helms, “Jingle Bell Rock” isn’t just devoid of any literal Christmas spirit—it’s purposefully lacking any. According to the Los Angeles Times , Helms came from a fairly religious background and knew that his mother would not approve of mixing religion with rock and roll (this was 1957, when rock music was still considered a dangerous trend corrupting the youth of America). ). Therefore, he made sure that the lyrics were completely free of religion.
“Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!”
Written by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne in 1945, Let It Snow! Let it snow! Let it Snow!” (yes, the phrase is repeated three times in the official title) was inspired by the exact opposite of Christmas: a heat wave . Sweltering in the California heat in an era before air conditioning was widely available, the songwriters conjured up the image of a cold, snowy morning, to cool his overheated nerves, and a holiday classic was born that never mentions Christmas .
“Frosty Snowman”
Perhaps the most annoying Christmas song of all time is associated with the holiday, thanks in large part to the beloved 1969 TV special built around the song, in which a snowman comes to life through a magic hat and terrorizes the neighborhood. But the song itself was intended as a more general song for the winter season , written specifically for Gene Autry in 1950 as a follow-up to his popular hit “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” When the television special was conceived, the song’s plot was expanded to include Christmas elements, including altered ending lyrics that replaced the words “back someday” with “back for Christmas”.
“Linus and Lucy” by Vince Guaraldi Trio
Originally written for the documentary soundtrack , the song, which has become a jazz standard (and the unofficial theme song of the Peanuts cartoons), has no lyrical content at all. The only reason we associate it with Christmas is because of its debut on the soundtrack of A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965. Even though the song appeared in all subsequent Charlie Brown specials and did not even contain bells or other holiday elements, as a result it is considered a Christmas song.
“Sledging”
Sleigh Ride is another Christmas classic that’s inspired by the heat and has nothing to do with Christmas . Composer LeRoy Anderson holed himself up in a hot cottage in Connecticut during the hot summer of 1946 and wrote “Sleigh Ride” wishing for cooler weather. He describes it as “just another piece of music I wrote.”
“My favourite things”
This classic song is now best known by Julie Andrews and The Sound of Music , but made its public debut in the 1959 Broadway production of the story. It was not originally intended to be a holiday song, but when the film was set to be released in 1965, the producers became concerned that they didn’t have a hit song that would drive ticket sales, so they approached singer Jack Jones about recording one of the songs. songs in hopes of getting on the charts. Jones was recording a Christmas album and liked “My Favorite Things” but was worried that it wasn’t really a Christmas song. Solution? ” Just add bells .” It worked.