They’re Great Songs. Are They Christmas Songs?

Dear listeners,

What makes a Christmas song … a Christmas song? Sleigh bells? Yuletide imagery? A certain indefinable, know-it-when-you-hear-it sense of reverence and good cheer?

My personal standard might sound a bit humbuggy: To me, a true Christmas song is one that I would not want to hear any month other than December. Even a song as brilliant and beloved as “All I Want for Christmas Is You” loses some of its power in March or August. With all due respect to Mariah Carey, please wait until all the Thanksgiving leftovers have been consumed.

But what about those cuspy, sort-of-Christmas songs? Well, at least they’re fun to argue about. “River” by Joni Mitchell — which begins with a melancholic piano interpolation of “Jingle Bells” — might be the quintessential example, and I believe with all my heart that it’s not a Christmas song, not only because it’s about feeling unable to get into the holiday mood, but also because it passes my test: I can, and do, listen to it during any and all months of the year. (Plus, it’s perfectly sequenced on “Blue,” which is definitely not a seasonal album.) The Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping,” on the other hand? Also a song I love, but one that I am only in the mood for one-twelfth of the year.

Some songs really do have it both ways, though: Christmas-appropriate, but also perennially listenable. For today’s playlist, I’ve picked nine tracks that I’m calling Questionable Christmas Songs.

Some tell stories that happen to take place around the holidays (“If We Make It Through December,” “’Tis the Damn Season”) and others have simply experienced a gradual shift in public perception so that, for some reason, people now consider them seasonally appropriate (“Holiday Road,” “Hallelujah,” “My Favorite Things”). All of them might be Christmas songs, depending on whom you ask, but they also might not be because I will not get mad if I hear any of them in April. Consider it my early gift to you: something to apolitically argue about at the holiday dinner table.

Also, speaking of Christmas songs: Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” officially hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100! If you read Friday’s Amplifier, you will understand how exciting this is — and you’ll be able to impress your friends by name-dropping a bunch of other great Brenda Lee songs. Congrats to Little Miss Dynamite!

Listen along on Spotify as you read.

1. Merle Haggard & the Strangers: “If We Make It Through December”

OK, this one might be a Christmas song because it appears on a Christmas album (“Merle Haggard’s Christmas Present”; please note the cover art), but Merle Haggard only decided to cut that album after the success of this stand-alone single — the biggest pop crossover hit of his entire career. There’s mention of gifts under the tree (or rather, a lack thereof), but the true subject of this melancholy tune is the plight of the down-and-out working man, meaning it is, first and foremost, a Merle Haggard song. (Listen on YouTube)

2. Lindsey Buckingham: “Holiday Road”

This delightful ditty was written for the 1983 film “National Lampoon’s Vacation” — not “Christmas Vacation.” But thanks to some version of the Mandela Effect, plus the fact that the word “holiday” is right there in the title, some confused people have started to insist that “Holiday Road” is a Christmas song. The country singer Chris Janson is vocal among them; he performed his cover of Lindsey Buckingham’s track on last year’s “Opry Country Christmas” broadcast, and he’s since released that cover with an extra festive lyric video. (Listen on YouTube)

3. Fleet Foxes: “White Winter Hymnal”

When a non-holiday song is suddenly reclassified in the cultural imagination as a holiday song, often, one must blame Pentatonix. On its popular holiday albums, the a cappella group has Christmas-ified such classics as “God Only Knows,” “Hallelujah” and, most recently and most puzzlingly, “Kiss From a Rose.” (We must resist this with all our might. We are not going to let Pentatonix convince us that “Kiss From a Rose” is a Christmas song.) The group’s version of this admittedly wintry 2008 Fleet Foxes tune appeared on “That’s Christmas to Me,” a 2014 Pentatonix album with an appropriately subjective title, but (can you tell?) I prefer the original. (Listen on YouTube)

4. The Handsome Family: “So Much Wine”

I have Phoebe Bridgers to thank for this one: It was her pick last year in her annual Christmas covers series. I’d never heard the original, and when I went back to check it out, I found that I actually preferred it to Bridgers’s more mournful rendition. Her version of this ballad of seasonal alcoholism is an out-and-out tear-jerker, but the Handsome Family manage to tell the same story with some dark comic relief. (Listen on YouTube)

5. Taylor Swift: “’Tis the Damn Season”

I believe it was my colleague Joe Coscarelli who, on an episode of Popcast, came up with one of my favorite Taylor Swift conspiracy theories: That “Evermore,” her second and decidedly more wintry 2020 album, was originally supposed to be a Christmas-themed release. This finely wrought ode to hometown what-ifs and temporarily rekindled romance is probably the strongest argument for that case. (Listen on YouTube)

6. The 1975: “Wintering”

Here’s another song about regressing at one’s parents’ house for a long weekend, a curiously season-specific track on the 1975’s excellent 2022 album “Being Funny in a Foreign Language.” I often appreciate the details in Matty Healy’s writing, and there are some particularly vivid ones here: a precocious, vegan sister; a fleece that doesn’t warm as well as advertised; a mother with a sore back who objects to being mentioned in the song. “I just came for the stuffing, not to argue about nothing,” Healy sings. “But mark my words, I’ll be home on the 23rd.” (Listen on YouTube)

7. Barbra Streisand: “My Favorite Things”

Written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein for the 1959 Broadway production “The Sound of Music,” “My Favorite Things” didn’t begin life as a holiday song. Julie Andrews performed it on a 1961 Christmas special, though, and since then its mentions of mittens, snowflakes and brown paper packages tied up with strings have made it sound at home on many a Christmas album — including Barbra Streisand’s. (Listen on YouTube)

8. Leonard Cohen: “Hallelujah”

Speaking of famous Jews singing are-they-really-Christmas songs, the endlessly over-covered, richly poetic, mordantly hilarious “Hallelujah” is in so many ways one of the most misunderstood songs in popular culture — so of course some people have turned it into a holiday standard. But as Stereogum’s Chris DeVille wrote in a 2019 essay, vehemently and correctly, “Whatever context it belongs in, Christmas ain’t it.” (Listen on YouTube)

9. The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl: “Fairytale of New York”

This is probably the only true Christmas song on the list, but it’s certainly an unconventional one — and of course I had to include it in honor of the Pogues’ Shane MacGowan, who died last week. Over the weekend, Rob Tannenbaum (a journalist with a very appropriate name for this purpose) published a fascinating piece about the making of the song, and the push to send it to the top of the charts in the United Kingdom. Might “Fairytale” be the next Christmas song to belatedly hit No. 1? (Listen on YouTube)

I get home on the 23rd,

Lindsay

The Amplifier Playlist

Listen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.

“I’ll Have a Questionable Christmas” track list
Track 1: Merle Haggard & the Strangers, “If We Make It Through December”
Track 2: Lindsey Buckingham, “Holiday Road”
Track 3: Fleet Foxes, “White Winter Hymnal”
Track 4: The Handsome Family, “So Much Wine”
Track 5: Taylor Swift, “‘Tis the Damn Season”
Track 6: The 1975, “Wintering”
Track 7: Barbra Streisand, “My Favorite Things”
Track 8: Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah”
Track 9: The Pogues, “Fairytale of New York”