Note: the Worldbuilding series will continue. I've been busy with other things over the past month but I haven't abandoned it.
It's December, and one of the local radio stations has gone over to an all-Christmas music format for the entire month. As it's one of my presets on the car radio, I wind up listening to that station a fair amount, especially during long commercial blocks on the other channels. Consequently I find myself paying more attention to Christmas songs than at any point in my life up to now.
An observation: most Christmas music is, of course, about Christmas. We have songs like "The Christmas Song" and "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." (Because it's an Oldies channel, I haven't heard "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" this year.)
However, there's a secret sub-genre of Christmas music which isn't actually about Christmas at all. I have provisionally named this sub-genre "Cold Weather Makeout Songs." The two greatest examples are "Let it Snow" and "Baby, It's Cold Outside." Neither one actually references Christmas at all, just cold weather and how nice it is to share body heat over a long winter night. Given the typical weather in February in North America, both could quite easily be Valentine's Day songs, but they're lumped in with Christmas all the same.
Adjacent to those two are songs about having more Platonic fun in wintertime. "Winter Wonderland" is best interpreted as a couple drunkenly staggering around in the snow before heading back to the chalet. And of course there's the grand-daddy of them all, the song which has become a synecdoche for the entire holiday season: "Jingle Bells." It isn't a Christmas song, it's about tearing around in a sleigh with your girlfriend and having hilarious slapstick accidents. Basically a 19th-Century snowmobile song. Canoodling by the fire afterward is implied but not stated outright.
This touches on an issue which has bothered me since about the time I learned to talk: the weird New England chauvinism of American Christmas celebrations. Why the emphasis on snow, sleigh bells, pumpkin pie, et cetera? About two-thirds of the United States are snowless at Christmas — and a pretty big slice of the country is snow-free all winter. Now I realize it's more fun to sing about snow than about chilly rain or fog, but I'd love for someone to write a Christmas song about bonfires on the levees, or midnight Mass, or Christmas tamales. If anybody knows of some examples, let me know so I can pass the word to the local radio station programming manager.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEvGKUXW0iI
Posted by: Nick | 12/23/2022 at 07:38 PM