This author finished this column in a location where the day’s forecasted high breached the 70s. A Christmas song is thus all the more crucial to salvaging any semblance of a holiday atmosphere.
Even when spring- or summer-esque air comes expectedly, people seek relief via Christmas tunes. A slew of noteworthy Christmas song origin stories began in July.
Granted, that does nothing to help curtail the Christmas creep, an opposite extreme of overkill. But the common urge to manufacture December delight during the dog days speaks to this season’s mood-healing power. When used properly, it can ward off and reverse day-to-day misery of almost any kind.
On the more serious side, other songs in the yuletide canon stem from strong will amidst crises or recoveries. Their composition created or acknowledged powerful diversions from distress. They epitomize the musical equivalent of bright, multi-colored lights combatting dark December skies.
Half of both varieties combine toward this list of the best unlikely Christmas song backgrounds.
10. “Must Be Santa”
This Mitch Miller tune joined “Christmas Spirit” as a tandem of holiday singles in 1960. That year, a Nov. 7 Billboard review noted, “Top side is an updated version of a familiar German drinking song.”
Entertainment Weekly was apt to revisit the connection nearly a half-century later. By the time Bob Dylan lent “Must Be Santa” a unique twist in 2009, Animaniacs had popularized “Schnitzelbank.” As if Billboard’s authority were not enough, the rhythmic parallels between Dylan and the Warners are virtually impossible to deny.
9. “Christmas Eve”
Gwen Stefani was walking among wildebeests on her boyfriend Blake Shelton’s ranch one day. She wanted to clear her head and conjure original tunes for her first Christmas album.
Yes, you read that right. That combination of end and means may seem to make as much sense as cramming for finals in a nightclub. But things have a way of weirdly working out. This was one of those exceptional success stories.
As Stefani told EW, “I was out there thinking to myself, ‘If I wrote a Christmas song, what would it be?’ And, literally, this whole chorus comes out of my mouth! I was just singing out loud, by myself, with the wildebeests, this song called ‘Christmas Eve.’”
That was this past summer, no less. Fast-forward to October of this year, and “Christmas Eve” joined five other originals and six classics on Stefani’s album.
8-6. “The Christmas Song,” “Let It Snow,” “Sleigh Ride”
All of these arose from insufferable summer conditions within a span of 13 months.
Last year, Lydia Hutchinson of Performing Songwriter retold the straightforward inception story behind 1945’s “The Christmas Song.” Every visual composer Bob Wells could conjure clashed with the weather of the day. It was all antithetical to nipped noses and donning Inuit attire.
But as Wells reportedly told collaborator Mel Torme, “It’s so damn hot today, I thought I’d writing something to cool myself off. All I could think of was Christmas and cold weather.”
The urge for the mere illusion of relief was self-evident. According to Torme’s subsequent memoir, the tandem completed their song within 45 minutes.
As it happened, 1945 was fruitful for songwriters pining for a cold reprieve. While Wells and Torme worked on “The Christmas Song,” Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne all but simultaneously conceived “Let It Snow.”
The next summer, Leroy Anderson found the inspiration for “Sleigh Ride” at the peak of July. Per his foundation’s website, he started after “digging trenches to try to find some old pipes coming from a spring.”
Unlike Wells, though, Anderson needed 18 months to complete his best-known work. With that said, it likely was “lovely weather for a sleigh ride” by February of 1948.
5. “We Need A Little Christmas”
Ace Collins summed this song’s story soundly in his Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas.
Jerry Herman’s holiday magnum opus was his way of recognizing the occasion’s time-transcendent healing power. Amidst America’s stressors of the ’60s, he wrote it for the portion of his musical, Mame, that covers the outset of the Great Depression one generation prior.
Collins wrote that Herman was, “Sensing the thirst for inspiration and recognizing the gift of joy and hope brought annually by the holidays.” Accordingly, “he crafted a song that embraced a message he believed.”
Indeed, the way the holiday season caps each calendar year makes it like a youth sports’ postgame ice-cream outing. Sometimes you enter the party on the heels of victory, other times defeat. But either way, you are drained and must have a treat.
Odds are Herman would agree that notion continues to transcend these times.
4. “Pretty Paper”
Long after leaving Texas, Willie Nelson honored a determined Fort Worth street salesman whose specialty was do-it-yourself greeting supplies. “Pretty Paper” recounts the story of Frankie Brierton, who once hawked said paper, along with companion pencils.
Brierton, who lost his legs to meningitis complications, became a seasonal staple outside Leonard’s Department Store. The bulk of his gratification was delayed, both in the form of the song and retroactive recognition. But those who remember him in the local press talk of his rigid resolve amidst forlornness, physical disadvantage and paltry earnings.
3. “Do You Hear What I Hear?
Anxiety over the Cuban Missile Crisis permeated the American public in October of 1962. Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne Baker’s co-composition may be that mood and time’s most telling remnant.
When Baker died, her Los Angeles Times obituary recalled Regney’s concern for the most innocent lives. He was, the paper reflected, “Inspired by the sight of infants in strollers on the streets of New York City.” The result was a first verse referencing a lamb and a closing verse imploring listeners to “pray for peace.”
2. “Winter Wonderland”
Dick Smith’s spirits-raising endeavor was especially personal. In 1933, the Pennsylvania native composed the tale of sleigh bells, new birds and pastoral snowmen while battling tuberculosis.
He would succumb to the disease within a year at age 33.
In a 2009 feature for the Wayne Independent, Peter Becker reflected on the standard’s regional epicenter. Becker wrote that Smith’s sister, Marjorie, “maintained…that her famous brother was inspired by the snow in Honesdale’s Central Park.”
By that account, the “beautiful site” Smith wrote of is easy enough to explain. But given his circumstances, it becomes a moving imperative “to face unafraid the plans that we made.”
1. “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24”
In 2011, music teacher Maria Stefanova blogged about the key cogs behind one of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s most potent vehicles. At the time of the Bosnian War, where Sarajevo endured the brunt of the carnage, cellist Vedran Smailović defied despair.
“He played his cello for 22 days,” Stefanova wrote. Each day represented one of 22 friends Smailović had lost in the conflict.
“He returned to the same place at 4:00 pm every day,” Stefanova added. “He played surrounded by the ruins of the city.”
That story of powerful memorialization and boldness during the four-year conflict first inspired British composer David Wilde. Savatage (and later TSO), in turn, used Wilde’s composition as the basis for “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24.”
The Siege of Sarajevo would officially end on Leap Day, 1996, four months after TSO released the song.
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