Merry Local Christmas
Yuletide tunes from particular places
Merry Christmas! Today I’m sharing my Christmas piece in The Bulwark this year—every year I write one major Christmas piece for a magazine—about Christmas songs from, and mostly played in, a particular state or part of the country.
It’s a fun piece with some neat cultural trivia. (It’s not about how our culture is too old and jaded to write happy Christmas songs anymore, for example.)
My first entry is “Dominick The Donkey,” an Italian-American novelty Christmas song especially popular in New Jersey/New York/Philadelphia. Here, if you want a dose of internet weirdness with your Christmas nostalgia, is AliExpress selling pillows emblazoned with some of the song’s lyrics.
A little more:
A Reddit user from the New York area relates that “one year it was literally played looped on the radio for an hour straight.” In the same thread, another writes, “I learned it from an Italian-American friend in the Marine Corps, [whose] name was Dominic, and his family always teased him with it.” In the second verse, Dominick delivers some clothes made in “Brook-a-leen,” but a version of the song performed for a Philadelphia fundraiser altered the lyrics to “South Philly,” that city’s historically Italian area. Lots of local stories note its enduring popularity with Italian Americans. Here’s a funny, heartwarming essay about the song by a fellow Calabrian—that’s where Monte’s family hailed from.
While the song is unquestionably corny—“Brook-a-leen,” “when Santa visits his paisans,” and that particularly undignified utterance, “chingedy-ching”—it’s still beloved; it gave Italian-American kids a little piece of the culture that was their own. “This was played every Christmas on my Sicilian grandparent’s record player,” one YouTube comment reads. “We’d put it on and all dance around like idiots after Christmas Eve dinner. Such nice memories.”
Isn’t that nice? Like, genuinely, unironically? And what’s wrong with a little corniness?
But I think my favorite is probably this, which touches on culture, retail, and Christmas:
“When the BC Clark Jingle first aired in 1956, no one could have predicted that it would become the Oklahoma tradition it is today,” reads the YouTube description for this Oklahoma City jewelry store’s long-running jingle. “Intended to promote BC Clark Jewelers’ annual Anniversary Sale, the Jingle has evolved over time into Oklahoma’s very own Christmas carol and an icon with a life of its own.”
Though there are a couple of qualifiers, this is a neat little bit of trivia: “It is very possible that the BC Clark Jingle may be the longest continuously running jingle in the United States.”
In the course of searching for regionally specific Christmas songs, I came across a couple of interesting bits I didn’t use or that didn’t quite fit. I’m sure I also missed a whole bunch of “Christmas in X” or “Christmas in Y” songs—a lot of these songs seem to have been written for radio stations, or as fundraisers, and many probably no longer get any play even on local radio. So with deeper research, you could write the same article again, I suppose.
There’s “Christmas in Dixie,” by the band Alabama, from the album Alabama Christmas, which actually includes wintry lines about cities and places all over America. For that reason, I didn’t include it in my article, even though the name fits.
Someone on Twitter told me that “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” is especially popular in the Upper Midwest. That’s not the region I’d expect, but it’s an honorable mention (though it’s also one of the few “Christmas” songs I truly dislike. I also don’t much care for “Fairytale of New York,” but luckily that isn’t a Christmas song anyway).
I liked this Redditor’s description of Dolly Parton’s “Hard Candy Christmas,” the name of which always confused me:
This song has been covered a couple different times, most recently by Caylee Hammack. This song refers back to a time when families who couldn’t afford much gave their children hard candy for Christmas. It could’ve been anything from candy canes to lollipops. In this song, hard candy is used as a metaphor that reminds us that life is often difficult, but it can also be sweet.
Interesting. Kind of like the original lyrics for “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” which reference “presents on the tree.” That referred to an old custom of hanging small gifts directly on the tree like ornaments—basically, what were relegated to the pre-main-event stocking stuffers as we got richer. It’s fascinating to me how Christmas songs are these little windows into what the texture of ordinary life in other times was like.
One classic I almost included but didn’t is “Feliz Navidad.” It’s not really regionally particular, though I’m sure it’s popular in José Feliciano’s home of Puerto Rico. It is in some ways culturally particular, though, being a bilingual song (if a very simple one) and one of the first such pieces of cultural production in America.
This is from Wikipedia:
Feliciano says he recorded the song while feeling homesick at Christmas, missing his family in New York City and his extended family further afield as he sat in a studio in Los Angeles. He remembered celebrating Christmas Eve with his brothers, eating traditional Puerto Rican foods, drinking rum, and going caroling. “It was expressing the joy that I felt on Christmas and the fact that I felt very lonely,” he told NPR in December 2020. “I missed my family, I missed Christmas carols with them. I missed the whole Christmas scene.”
Feliciano also said this about the song in 2020, sort of in reference to people who might not like the idea of a popular song in a foreign language: “Nobody can get angry that you made them sing ‘Feliz Navidad’ because it’s in Spanish. Nobody can get angry because you made them sing the English part. I wanted to wish you a merry Christmas. And I think it’s wonderful.”
There was this idea that bilingualism was sort of symbolic of peace. But it’s hard for someone my age today to understand how touchy this sort of thing could be. This was when Feliciano sang the Star-Spangled Banner in a nonstandard way, in 1968:
Feliciano told NPR his stylized interpretation cost him. “I had to leave America and play in other countries because I wasn’t getting any radio play after I did ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’” But for fellow Nuyoricans — New York Puerto Ricans, like Bobby Sanabria — Feliciano was a hero.
Which brings me to my concluding observation in the original piece: that even the most overplayed Christmas songs have elements of particular places and particular moments in time, if you look closely. I offer a few examples in the piece. Here’s one:
There’s “Silver Bells,” which is about Christmas shopping in a big city, generally understood to be New York City (though it may have been inspired by a bell on an office desk). Come to think of it, almost all of the “wintry” Christmas songs could have ended up being regional—how much nostalgia can a native Floridian feel for cold winters? But, perhaps owing to New England’s role in shaping the American imagination, the coldest, snowiest version of Christmas is the one that became mainstream and nationalized. The internet tells me that even in Australia, all the winter-themed songs play.
Check out the whole piece! And merry Christmas!
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