It’s that time of year again, folks. Tinseled trees are twinkling in living rooms, students are heading home after their final exams, snow is being artificially generated for soft drink commercials, and most importantly, millions of retail workers around the world are descending into madness after hearing “All I Want For Christmas Is You” for the fourteenth time in a single shift.  

During the holiday season, I’m always reminded of my own time in customer service and, having fully experienced the unique derangement induced by continual exposure to yuletide-themed music, I feel it’s a good time to tell a little Christmas Carol of my own. So pour yourself some eggnog, put on some woolen socks, and cast your mind back to the bygone halcyon days of 2021, where the young, innocent—downright cherubic, really—bank teller-era Liam has just arrived to work on a blustery first morning of December.

 That morning, like every December 1st, my bank branch’s PA system switched from what I called “Car Commercial Pop” to a selection of “All Christmas, All The Time” which would remain that way until January, adding a little festivity to each customer’s day for the few minutes that it took for them to do their deposits and withdrawals. Of course, it meant something very different for us employees, who could look forward to trudging through the same two-dozen-or-so songs for eight hours a day, every single day, for an entire month. 

I knew that a weaker man might have buckled under the same conditions, but did I let those damn Pentatonix under my skin? Did I enter a grinchesque anti-holiday radicalization arc? Of course not, I did what any good neurodivergent English major would do: I started to overthink things.

Because when you have nothing to do but sit at your wicket and hyperfixate on it, Christmas music starts to seem pretty weird. 

Even if you manage to put aside all that “birth of our divine savior” business (which I admit comes easy for me, coming from a secular household), there’s really no other category of commercial art that we engage with in even a remotely similar way. As the days rolled on, my questions only multiplied. I would lay awake at midnight, the sound of sleigh bells still echoing in my ears, wondering…

“What even is Christmas music?”

And perhaps more urgently…

‘What is the best Christmas song?’

With that, I had my holiday quest, and for the rest of the month I badgered pretty much anyone who would listen to me with questions about Christmas music, in hopes of finding the “true meaning of Christmas” or something Hallmark-y like that. If nothing else, I thought I could learn a bit about people by getting some insight into what Christmas meant to them! 

(Now, I can already tell some of you are rolling your eyes at this framing device. “Come on Liam, you insufferable pedant,” you sneer. “Christmas music is music about Christmas! No need to overcomplicate it!” 

To you I say: “Shut up and listen to my story!” 

I really need some less confrontational hypothetical readers. But anyway…)

1. Christmas music is not just “music about Christmas” 

In a Starbucks after some shopping, I asked my mom. 

‘Mom, what’s your favourite Christmas song?’

“Hmm,” she thought for a moment, “Fairytale of New York”, by The Pogues”

Now, I could already tell this would be more complicated than I had thought. Because, is “Fairytale” really even a Christmas song? Sure, it mentions Christmas a few times, and while that definition is functional enough to get by in most contexts, it simply didn’t hold up under rigorous scrutiny. 

The more I thought about it, the more the logic seemed to resemble that unbearably smug ‘Die Hard is the best Christmas Movie’ thing (which seems to have originated from a Slate article before being brought to the mainstream in S09E09 of The Office), and frankly, I wasn’t satisfied. 

The song, a masterpiece though it may be, is basically just about being horribly drunk and heartsick and hating all of the choices you’ve made that left you feeling this way, which honestly could very well happen any night of the year. 

Much like Die Hard, you could probably remove the explicit references to Christmas from “Fairytale” and still be left with a basically-intact (though far less iconic, I’d wager) piece of media. 

And every day at work, I was hearing a whole host of songs like “Sleigh Ride,” “Jingle Bell Rock”, “Baby It’s Cold Outside”, and “Winter Wonderland”, which—despite being staples of Christmas playlists everywhere—don’t even mention the holiday a single time (If singing about snow and winter makes music Christmasey, I must ask why Bublè hasn’t ever covered any Scandinavian black metal). Not to suggest that these songs don’t qualify at all, but the label of “Christmas Music” clearly went a bit deeper than a simple question of subject matter.‍

2. Christmas music is, let’s face it, annoying

Shovelling our driveway after a blizzard, I asked my dad.

“Dad, what’s your favourite Christmas song?”

“I don’t have one”, he grumbled, “They’re all annoying.”

I’m sure some of you can relate to him; I certainly did myself at the time! 

Because yeah, while the average “Jingle Bell Rock” rendition is only about two and a half minutes long, over a whole season you’re probably looking at multiple hours solely dedicated to pondering what the fuck a “jingle hop” is supposed to be, and that’s if you’re just a casual shopper! 

If you have a retail worker in your life, I’d ask you again to spare them a thought.

Repetition is always going to breed some amount of resentment, and I guarantee that even your favourite “song of the summer” would probably lose some of its lustre after a hundred or so spins, especially if you’re being forced to listen to it against your will. 

It seemed to me that Christmas music—or at least, the poppier side of it—seemed doomed never to be enjoyed, or even really listened to with any kind of intent. 

Most people, by the time they’re old enough to walk, are so desensitized by exposure that the notion of actually trying to critically engage with a Christmas song is about as ridiculous as assessing the aesthetic merits of a cereal box. At some point, passivity becomes the only way to interact with a form of media so pervasive and inevitable.

Not to mention that the general secularization of the holiday season makes the subject matter for Christmas music witheringly simplistic. As much as I don’t personally believe in the sanctity of the Nativity, I can still get down with the sublime drama of “O Holy Night”, (that “Fall on your knees” part never fails to give me some serious frisson). But what is there to feel about Paul McCartney’s frankly asinine “Wonderful Christmastime”? 

If nothing else, “We’re here tonight / And that’s enough” sums up the apathetic doldrums of going to a holiday party out of nothing but sheer obligation, but that’s not a particularly moving sentiment. 

Modern Christmas music is full of songs which basically say nothing besides some puerile, uber-sanitized message about being happy for the sake of being happy (sung to an equally grating melody), so I really don’t blame anyone who decides to simply not engage with it.

But personally? I say screw media passivity! Analyze anything closely enough and I guarantee it’ll become interesting. So to all the humbugs out there, I’d recommend you try to find a Christmas song that speaks to you!‍

3. Christmas music is a canon

During a midday lull, I asked a coworker. 

“Linda, what’s your favourite Christmas song?”

“Oh, that’s easy!” she chirped, “Underneath the Tree” by Kelly Clarkson.”

Let me level with you, dear reader. I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that I’d never heard of it. This isn’t a knock against Kelly, I later listened to it and thought it was a great entry in the tradition of “Christmas Song That’s Really A Love Song”, but it probably says something that despite twenty five Christmases under my belt (including multiple seasons of Retail Holiday Radio) I’d never encountered it out “in the wild”.

Here, let me demonstrate what I mean. Go to your streaming service of choice right now, type in “Underneath The Tree” and look at the results.

Sure, Kelly’s track is good, but it looks a little… lonely?

Now repeat the same steps with, I dunno, “Jingle Bells”.

I don’t think I need to belabour the point that there’s something different going on between these two, but I’m going to do it anyway with another question: without looking it up, who wrote “Jingle Bells?” 

How about “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree?” or “Let it Snow”? The answers, as it turns out, aren’t important; what matters is that you probably don’t know!

As much as I dislike appeals to populism, I think there’s something to be said for notoriety, and here’s where I’ll draw a not-at-all-confusing distinction between individual “Christmas songs” and the wider category of “Christmas Music”. 

Because yeah, if you pick up a guitar and record a little tune about buying Christmas presents for your mom, who am I to say it’s not a Christmas song? At the same time, I don’t think anyone would reasonably include that in the loose informal collection of recognizable songs that we hear every December. 

So what gives? What determines when a song goes from being simply Christmas-adjacent to a genuine Christmas Song?

Much like in a cultural canon of folk music, I’d contend that authorship becomes increasingly obfuscated (and irrelevant) as a piece of media finds its place in tradition, as the iterative process of re-learning, re-recording, and re-interpretation strips away and replaces aspects of the original composition while still maintaining the same essential structure. 

Christmas songs aren’t just folk music with a holiday theme (while I’m sure we all have our preferences for whether “The Rocky Road To Dublin” is better performed by Luke Kelly or Lankum, they aren’t strictly tied to any given period of the year and you’d certainly never expect to hear any of them being played at Walmart) but I think some of the same concepts are applicable nonetheless. 

Today, “All I Want For Christmas is You”–– perhaps the pinnacle of Christmas music by contemporary commercial standards–– is pretty strongly associated with Mariah Carey, and yeah, that will probably stay the same for the near future (the singer herself seems to be capitalizing on the “defrosting Mariah” meme further adding to her longevity). But will that still be the case in ten, twenty, or fifty years? I’d wager that if Generation Gamma is still listening to “A.I.W.F.C.I.Y.”, it might very well have, by that point, ascended to the hallowed status of anonymity.

4. Christmas music is personal

Over a couple of beers and some Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, I asked my brother,

“Ben, what’s your favourite Christmas song?”

“I’d go with ‘Tanenbaum’” he said.

After some pretty standard answers, I admit this really puzzled me. After all, what kind of deep message about the holiday season could he have been picking up on in an ode to a tree? 

Did he feel there was nothing more quintessentially festive than a big glowing spruce in the middle of a living room? 

Maybe he was remembering the joy of waking up early as a child to find what Santa had left for us, or perhaps he’d found a more grown-up appreciation for decking the proverbial halls, tree included.

“You mean ‘O Christmas Tree’?” I asked, wondering when he’d learned German. 

“Nah”, he corrected me, “The ‘Charlie Brown Christmas’ one.”

 At this point, I realized I may have been looking at this whole thing wrong. Up until then I’d been unintentionally treating the question as a sort of personality test, lining up the pertinent lyrical themes of each song with whatever the person might value about the holiday season. 

Someone who loves “Silent Night”? They find meaning in the peace and slow comfort of the holidays, and are at least a little bit religious. “It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”? Maybe they like the more bombastic, LED-flashing side of things, and probably give really extravagant presents. And fans of “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer”? I’m sure they’ll really miss their Kindergarten teacher over the break!

Jokes aside, I could admit that I might have been reading into it a bit too much, and that not everyone was intellectualizing their answers to the same degree that I was.

Vince Guaraldi’s 1965 record A Charlie Brown Christmas is genuinely one of THE definitive pieces of Christmas media in my house growing up, and despite being a mostly-instrumental jazz album it still conveys almost all the emotions and feelings that I associate with the season. 

My brother’s answer (aside from proving my earlier point about anonymization and canonization) wasn’t refuting the basis of my holiday quest; quite the opposite, it was widening my scope more than I’d ever imagined, and as I found out, leading me straight to what could be the true answer I was looking for.

‍5. Christmas music is perennial

On a snowed-in Christmas Eve, I finally asked my partner.

“Babe, what’s your favourite Christmas song?”

“Don’t you know?” she asked, “It’s ‘My Favourite Things’ from The Sound of Music!”

Similar to my earlier point about “Fairytale of New York”, this answer also stuck out to me as a bit strange. Was I misremembering the song? Surely not, it doesn’t mention Christmas at all! 

We glanced over the wikipedia plot summary, and lo and behold, there isn’t even a Christmas scene in the original musical (before you point it out, “So Long, Farewell” is not sung at a Christmas party). 

Despite my earlier epiphany, I found it hard to understand what could be behind this seemingly tenuous association, until I stumbled upon another little detail (it was in the next section on the wikipedia article).

Ever since its first broadcast by the BBC in 1968, The Sound of Music has been a staple of holiday programming, routinely playing on television networks either on Christmas or in the days leading up to it. 

Why? Your guess is as good as mine! The fact remains that to my partner’s family –and millions of others like them– the film and its soundtrack were as Christmasey as gingerbread and sugarplums. 

Despite being inherently unrelated to the holiday season in terms of content, themes, or aesthetics, the film (and by extension, its soundtrack) became part of the Christmas media tradition simply by nature of being watched, year after year, at Christmas.

It really seemed like the thing that encompassed all the different meanings of Christmas music was in front of my face all along. As I drifted off to sleep on Christmas Eve, a single word occurred to me: Perenniality, the quality of being continually recurring for long periods of time.

This whole piece has been essentially just getting to that point: Christmas music is just music we listen to at Christmas time! As anticlimactic as that might be, never fear, because the groundwork is now actually set for the REAL point of this article. Yes, it’s the last-minute dramatic denouement to my carol:

Coda: Wham’s “Last Christmas”: An Absurdist Masterpiece

Have you read any Camus? Even if not, you’re likely familiar with the image of Sisyphus, a guy from Greek legend condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down every time, who you might know as the namesake of Camus’ 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus. 

What you probably didn’t know is that the part about Sisyphus himself is only a few pages at the end of the book used to as a sort of final metaphor for the idea of absurdism, which, to massively tl;dr it, means we make our own meaning in life because the universe doesn’t readily present meaning to us. 

Camus uses a bunch of less-mythological examples like pursuing romances or creating art as ways in which people “colour the void” of existence, and part of his point is that even though these pursuits are always doomed to end in some way or another (breakups/death, the completion of a project), there’s joy to be found in the moments that a thing exists.

Bear with me, I’m really going somewhere with this.

Something I’ve always felt gets overlooked about this idea of sisypheanism is that Camus is saying we tend to find meaning in cycles. 

The fact that something begins, ends, and begins anew is integral to our ability to find sustained significance in it, and it’s also pretty handy that it maps so readily onto natural cycles in the world around us. 

Christmas—like most other holidays—is at its most basic level just a signification of the arbitrarily-determined end of the year and the beginning of a new one. By extension, Christmas music is necessarily just the music that we all implicitly agree to listen to to commemorate that.

I’ve mentioned so many songs in this piece so far, and each one is its own little snapshot of the kaleidoscopic superposition of “the meaning of Christmas”, but I don’t think there’s any song which captures the particular absurdism inherent in Christmas music as much as Wham!’s 1984 song “Last Christmas”. I’m sure you know how it goes:

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart,

But the very next day, you gave it away.

This year, to save me from tears,

I’ll give it to someone special.

I know what you’re thinking. It’s a song about a breakup, so what? And yeah, maybe it is just an unremarkable piece of mid-80’s synthpop, but I think there’s something really interesting about the way “Last Christmas” engages with the—say it with me—perenniality of Christmas music.

Because, what’s being described here? This person is reminiscing about the previous Christmas season’s heartbreak, and making a promise that this year’s romance will be true and successful. But, as a listener? 

We’ve literally heard the story before, last year, and the year before that, and what reason do we have to believe this year will be any different? It’s not hard to imagine the person who “gave [their heart] away” was once themselves “someone special” who promised salvation from that year’s tears. 

The song even seems to lean into this interpretation, since in the final choruschanges its lyric to “next year, I’ll give it to someone special”, confirming that despite all their promise, this year’s someone was not so special after all. 

So every year when I hear “Last Christmas” I feel there’s a subtly tragic futility to the singer’s hope in themselves, because I have full confidence that next year I’ll be hearing the same story play out all over again.

While most other Christmas songs—and really, media in general—can be said to be set at a particular point, “Last Christmas” is, in a sense, endless. It knows that it exists within a perennial artform tradition, actively and joyfully participating in the futile cyclicality of it all by telling a story that’s intended to repeat ad infinitum. 

I dunno, I think that’s pretty cool. 

Merry Christmas everyone, and Happy Holidays.