Well if you can't beat 'em, join 'em as I say. Sure, things didn't turn out as I had hoped this November and come January 20, our country will turn back the clock and return to a time that about 50 percent of the electorate hoped and prayed was gone for good.
So be it. I've made an early new year's resolution to stop caring. In that vein I decided to ween myself from my former daily dose of reading, watching, listening and talking about politics. Instead of reading for example the New York Times, The Atlantic, and my other once go-to sources of information about the world outside my door, I've only been reading about sports. I've also given up the habit of automatically tuning in to the local NPR affiliate on the radio, instead I have my dial set to a station that plays nothing but Christmas music 24/7. I've also given up discussing politics on social media and have turned my attention there solely to watching cat videos. And instead of watching news and political commentary on TV, I've turned to watching nothing but Italian soap operas.
The problem is that never before in my life do I remember a bleaker time for Chicago sports teams. So listening to endless stories about the futility of the prospects for all the hometown teams I've rooted for my entire life, does little to alleviate my depression of the thought of...
Well, you know.
While I still love Christmas, for reasons I care not go into, the holiday has lost much of its sparkle for me. Consequently, the din of sleighbells, ho ho hoing and perfunctory cheer tends to induce more melancholia than merriment these days.
And subjecting myself to endless hours of cat videos makes me seriously question what I'm doing with my life.
All I can say is this, thank God for streaming TV and Italian soap operas.
Anyway, in the midst of decking the halls with mistletoe while rockin' around the Christmas tree, I did sneak in an NPR break. And on what subject were they reporting? Christmas music of course.
The story reminded me of a Christmas long ago and a conversation my brother-in-law and I had with our very Catholic father-in-law. As was their tradition, our wives' parents had non-stop Christmas music playing on the radio. I think it was just to pull his chain more than anything else, but both my brother-in-law and I brought up the fact that most of the Christmas music we were hearing was written by Jewish composers.
Our father-in-law, whose annual Christmas decorations consisted of a wreath on the door and sign on the window that read, "Put Christ back in Christmas", was incredulous.
But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. For starters, the percentage of Christmas music written by Jewish composers closely reflects the percentage of Jewish composers of popular music.
As the popular music industry is above all. a business, success means having your songs played a lot, which naturally translates to sales (a difficult subject these days in the music industry) and everything that entails. Now think of all the pop songs that are written and recorded in a given year compared to the number of songs that actually make money. I have no idea what that number is but it has to be extremely small. And when a song does become a hit, meaning one of the most listened to songs of a particular moment, that moment is the window of opportunity to make serious money. And that window opening, unless the song becomes a major hit, is fairly short.
Now imagine writing and recording a hit Christmas song. If it catches on with the public, not only is the window of opportunity to make money open soon after the song is released, but also during every subsequent holiday season.
But I never realized HOW lucrative Christmas music can be. The NPR piece pointed out that at this writing, the top five songs on the Billboard hot 100 (the industry standard for determining the most popular songs of a given week), are Charismas songs, some of them recorded over 60 years ago.
I don't have anything to back this up, but I imagine that Paul McCartney makes way more money these days on his insipid (to my ears) Wonderful Christmastime, than he does on Hey Jude. In this article about the public's enduring ambivalence to that song, McCartney makes between 400 and 600K per annum for all the times WC gets played between October 31st and December 25th at all the Walmarts, Shopcos, and Piggly Wigglies across this great land of ours, and their equivalents around the world.
But that number pales in comparison the reported 2.5 million dollar royalty check Mariah Carey earns every year for what has become the most popular Christmas tune of all for the umpteenth year, All I Want for Christmas is You.
And it seems that the really successful Christmas tunes if anything, gain traction over the years, so that window of opportunity to make money only becomes wider every year. Who knows what Mariah and Macca will be making on those songs in ten years!
So the moral is, if you want to be a pop songwriter, try your hand at writing Christmas tunes. Cha ching, you just never know.
The other not surprising in the least thing about non-Christians writing popular Christmas music is that the vast majority of it is not religious at all, and probably a majority of the non-religious stuff is not even about the holiday. Much of it centers around winter, and all the fun things you can do in the snow such as riding in a one-horse open sleigh. Or if that doesn't float your boat, if you find the weather outside frightful, you can stay inside where it's warm and delightful, and do whatever your imagination desires, while resigning yourself just to let it snow. One wonderful, racy and to today's ears somewhat controversial song, the 1944 Frank Loesser diddy Baby I'ts Cold Outside, doesn't even leave to the imagination what you can do inside.
One of my favorite pop music Christmas songs that really is about Christmas is the 1943 classic, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, written for the film Meet Me in St. Louis by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine. It's about the very real pain of celebrating the season during a time of suffering and loss, made especially poignant as the song was written and originally released during the middle of World War II. Of course, that sentiment runs contrary to all the feelings we're supposed to feel this time of year, so the song's lyrics were altered several times over the years to make it "less depressing." Today it remains one of the most popular Christmas songs that you'll hear played incessantly along with Holly Jolly Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Jingle Bell Rock, and the rest at your local Target.
Heck I'm going there now, oh boy!
Which brings up one final thought.
The web is filled with articles about surveys of people's favorite and least favorite Christmas songs. Should anyone be surprised that the same songs are on both lists?
While I wouldn't put it on my list of least favorite Christmas songs, by the third or fourth time I've heard Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas played on the same shopping trip in the same store, I wouldn't mind never hearing it ever again. That goes for a lot of songs that at one time I really loved.
You can guess how I feel about the Christmas songs I've never loved in the first place.
So what do folks like me who love Christmas, just not the same 20 songs played again and again every holiday, listen to by choice?
Sometimes songs are popular for a reason and finding good alternatives can be a little challenging.
It's always fun to match artists with material you wouldn't automatically associate them with.
When you think of Christmas, the last person you might come up with is Screamin' Jay (I Put a Spell on You) Hawkins. Halloween yes, Christmas no. In preparation for this post, I discovered with great joy and expectation that he does indeed have a Christmas song.
Unfortunately it really sucks.
I listened to the whole thing expecting a payoff at the end, but it never came. Screamin' Jay really should have stuck to Halloween.
The cool cats go for kitsch and what better than the Queen of Kitsch herself, Marlene Dietrich? Here she is, singing Little Drummer Boy, in German no less.
Not bad but a little maudlin in my book. Like Sreamin' Jay's song, the idea of it maybe is better than the song itself.
But five years ago I found it, my perfect Christmas song. It's a song we all know, sung by two wonderful artists who while not being as far-removed from the idea of Christmas as say Screamin' Jay, or even Marlene, nonetheless are a little out of their element here.
That's why it works so bloody well.
And it truly captures the spirit of joy of the season as well as any song I can think of, heck I wouldn't even mind hearing it a thousand times a year.
The best part is that I will never have to. Here's Leon Redbone and Dr. John, together singing Frosty the Snowman:
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