Revisiting The Modern Christmas Song Void

Are we too mature for unironic joy and contentment?

I was doing some online reading/research for this year’s Christmas article (regionally particular Christmas songs—stay tuned!), and I came across a comment in this Reddit thread that I found fascinating. I’m going to quote it at length:

The Midcentury Era in the United States has become a sort of a mythic era in American culture, much like the Old West. It is the era in which modern American life as we know it today began: suburban life for a huge portion of the population, car culture, strip malls, fast food, etc. It’s no longer generational nostalgia that fuels it; it is multi-generational cultural nostalgia for a sort of imagined Golden Age of America. No matter how much we may look back on that time period and see the injustices that were all over the place for what they were, the image of that time is incredibly powerful. And because that it so powerful, especially for a holiday as absolutely and monolithically dominant in American culture like Christmas (it’s the one holiday you cannot escape), I feel like it just amplifies everything tenfold.

As far as why “All I Want for Christmas is You” is the last bona fide “Christmas Standard,” it is interesting. There is tons of stuff online that shows how the song was deliberately built to call back to the Motown Christmas songs of the 60s in its composition, and that is probably a big factor in its success. Also as a sidenote, it is wild how aggressively “All I Want for Christmas is You” is marketed these days. You know it’s Christmastime on Spotify when you go on and Mariah Carey is literally everywhere.

In all honesty, I’m not entirely sure why no Christmas song written since has really been able to break through in a huge way into becoming a new standard. Musicians certainly try all of the time, and there is no shortage of modern Christmas music being made. I’m also sure everyone here has their modern favorites in terms of Christmas music, but for some reason none of it really punches through to hitting that general audience sweet spot. Modern streaming services certainly are trying to get some through, like Ariana Grande, Sia, and stuff like that, and I do appreciate that.

However, and this is a point I remember reading back on r/popheads (I think) a while back, which speculated that the reason why we haven’t really had a slew of new Christmas standards is that Christmas media in general requires this level of sincerity and sentimentality (and perhaps naivete) that American culture doesn't really know how to make anymore. A lot of modern Christmas media takes on this ironic, deconstructive, postmodern tone (think in movies stuff like “The Night Before” or in music something like “Christmas Tree” by Lady Gaga), while the stuff that is made with this sentimental sincerity tends to come across nauseatingly saccharine. And the stuff that does hit the sweet spot doesn’t really have the market power to get anywhere meaningful.

What, perhaps you wonder, is “Christmas Tree” by Lady Gaga? It includes lines like “everybody knows / We will take off our clothes,” “I’m spreading Christmas cheer,” and “My Christmas tree is delicious.” And you thought “Hurry down the chimney tonight” was a little risqué! (Well, now you do. Sorry.)

But I find this fascinating because it’s basically what I hypothesized in my Christmas piece two years ago, in 2021. I wrote a little follow-up to that here, back then, but it’s one of my favorite magazine pieces I’ve written, and I’d like to re-up it for this year.

I called that piece—my headline—“The Curious Rise of the Complicated Christmas Song.” I basically looked at this same widely noted phenomenon—that the “Christmas canon” is a bell curve that hugs the Fifties, and stretches back to the 1930s and then tapers off in the Nineties with “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” There are a few commonly played and pretty solid modern entries, but none of them quite belong to that canon. It’s almost eerie to think about this and realize that in some sense you’re seeing a cultural moment, a version of your country, end.

I don’t mean that as some kind of knock against pluralism or diversity. Heck, the Christmas canon itself was the result of a sort of midcentury version of pluralism: Jewish songwriters wrote quite a bit of it, and crafted a secular and deeply “American” version of Christmas that ended up being universal. And I love it. And corny or risqué or otherwise “non-traditional” Christmas tunes? Those have always existed too.

What “ended” was specifically the kind of uncritical, unironic, sincere, simple appreciation that comes through in many of those classics. They’re almost immature—childish. I get the sense that, as an entire culture, we’ve grown up and matured, and, like a child, lost some of our innocence and imagination and capacity for wonder.

Back in 2021 I wrote:

These changes in the nature of the canon of secular Christmas music reflect a profound shift away from the arrangements and attitudes of the middle of the twentieth century….the average age of marriage has risen; divorce is more common; and young people tend to spend a long interlude between leaving their parents’ house and starting their own household.

…we are more sensitive today to those who do not celebrate Christmas or for whom the holidays can be stressful or depressing times—all the more so because of the atmosphere of compulsive cheerfulness. We are encouraged, far more than in the postwar era, to express ourselves, to buck social norms, and to think socially and politically about things like working conditions, wages, and economic inequality. We are…trained to deconstruct, interrogate, and problematize pop culture artifacts, especially those which uncritically celebrate normalcy.

Nothing in the classic collection of Christmas songs reflects or acknowledges any of this. It was inevitable that holiday entertainment would catch up.

I used a bunch of the more recent Christmas songs to illustrate this:

Kelly Clarkson’s 2013 “Underneath The Tree,” while happy and upbeat, also refers to years of lonely, gray Christmases. “You Make It Feel Like Christmas,” a 2017 Gwen Stefani-Blake Shelton duet, is also cheerful and upbeat, although the happy couple in the song came through some hard times: “Thought I was done for / Thought that love had died . . . I never thought I’d find a love like this.”…

“Where Are You Christmas,” from 2000, may have been written for that year’s live-action How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but the lines “My world is changing, I’m rearranging / Does that mean Christmas changes too?” also suggest such once-invisible themes as divorce and mid-life crisis. Or consider 1990’s “Grown-Up Christmas List,” a reflection on growing up and realizing the hollowness of consumerism and the depth of suffering in the world.

I remember, as a kid, finding children’s books that made casual references to things like divorce. I think I understood that this was just a part of real life, and that to pretend it didn’t exist—or that any other unfortunate or tragic thing didn’t exist—would be to essentially write not just fiction, but place it in a fictional world. But my own world was cozy and stable and safe, and I didn’t like being exposed to things that were real but which basically weren’t real to me.

To some extent, of course, we were representing things that had been excluded before. It’s more complete. But I wonder how you would, or if you can or should, weigh the comfort people carrying these burdens take from seeing their lives shown, versus the discomfort of those whose lives are free of those burdens and feel forced to carry them? I suppose there’s room for all of it.

I’m not sure how related that is to any of this—the fact is, I think many of these newer Christmas songs are pretty good, and they’re fundamentally happy, acknowledging sorrow or loneliness only in the past. (My favorite, if you’re wondering, is probably “You Make It Feel Like Christmas”—for some reason it got middling reviews, but I quite like its sincerity, and it’s combination of joy and poignance. And it’s almost arresting to hear Stefani sing “like a present sent from God” in a secular Christmas song from 2017.)

I guess I’m saying what that Reddit commenter is saying at the end there—that in some sense, these old songs—innocent, simplistic, sweet but not saccharine, idealized but not completely fake—are almost like artifacts. They hail from something that we can recognize today as a different time. That sort of cultural production, and the mindset that could genuinely produce it, is simply closed off to us. For good and for ill.

What is that? Do countries and cultures “grow” like people? I speculated so in my piece:

It would be wrong, or at least incomplete, to blame these cultural shifts on cultural leftism or on the Sixties. They may even be inevitable as countries become more affluent and more diverse. One of my wife’s “aunts,” an older woman who grew up in China, once suggested much the same thing about her country. Chinese television had gotten more complicated, she told us; the shows dealt with more sensitive topics, and had moved beyond two-dimensional, party-line portrayals of things like family life and work.

This reflected, she mused, that the country was growing up—becoming freer in some ways, collectively reaching a cultural and economic point where such complexities could be more openly discussed. This is an anecdote. But I suspect the evolution of our Christmas music tells a similar story of the United States.

The irony is that for all our economic growth, it is not clear that we are any happier for it, even if we are freer. Perhaps that is for the better. Or perhaps, when Auntie Mame sang in 1966 that “I’ve grown a little leaner, grown a little colder, Grown a little sadder, grown a little older,” she was merely half a century early.

Lean, cold, sad, old. Or maybe I’m overthinking it all. And this year’s piece is just a whimsical little tour of Christmas songs specific to places. Merry Christmas!

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Related Reading:

Crisis Christmas Songs

Christmas Song Urbanism

The Christmas Clock

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