So This Is Christmas. Hey, Mister Disc Jockey, Play Something Real Sad.
Most of the obituaries for Shane MacGowan, who was the lead singer of the punk-Irish band the Pogues and died November 30, made the seasonally appropriate point that his best-remembered recording was likely the downbeat Christmas drama “Fairytale of New York.”
To summarize “Fairytale” briefly, economic hardship sends a relationship spiraling from twinkly-eyed delight into bitter insults and recrimination.
Steve Lillywhite, who produced the track, suggested its dark rumination makes it unique among Christmas and holiday songs.
“All the other Christmas records compete against each other,” Lillywhite told the New York Times. “Whereas with ‘Fairytale,’ its only competition is itself.”
That perspective would have pleased MacGowan, who posited himself as a steadfast musical contrarian even while he was drawing heavily on traditional styles.
But Lillywhite is wrong.
It’s true that if you only listened to the relative handful of Christmas songs that dominate the playlist in malls or on Christmas-formatted radio stations, you might think Christmas music is pretty much “White Christmas,” “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” “Feliz Navidad,” “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” “Santa Baby” and chestnuts roasting on an open fire, that is, thematic opposites from “Fairytale of New York.”
In the wider spectrum, however, all Christmas songs aren’t merry and bright and everyone’s Christmases aren’t white.
Start with “Pretty Paper,” the tale of a man alone on the street, invisible to all the happy people who won’t buy a few sheets of wrapping paper and help him survive another hard day. There aren’t many sadder songs.
But “Daddy’s Drinking Up Our Christmas,” sung by Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen, is also pretty bleak. And it’s a better record than John Denver’s similarly sobering “Please Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas).”
In truth, there are dozens of Christmas songs that range from depressing to depraved. Few get more than cult attention, even if the occasional warped tune like “Don’t Shoot Me Santa” by the Killers or “Christmas In Jail” by the Youngsters incorporates enough cleverly dark humor to keep it in the holiday rotation. A small number of pure joke songs also recur, sometimes too often: “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” “I’m Getting Nuttin’ For Christmas,” “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer.”
Creating a melancholy Christmas song, however, does not require pancaking Grandma, because a fair number of people don’t find Christmas or other yearend holidays all that holly jolly in the first place.
The absence of loved ones can render the holidays empty, for instance, and you could fill a sleigh with songs built on that lament.
The patriarch is “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” written in 1943 from the viewpoint of a soldier who had no idea when if ever he would get home at all. When the lie in the song’s title becomes explicit in the last verse, it snuffs out all the warm glowing images that came before. Bing Crosby made the song a hit and hundreds of subsequent singers have found it irresistible.
A few of its many descendants include “Please Come Home for Christmas,” “Blue Christmas” (“Decorations of red / On a green Christmas tree / Won’t mean a thing, dear / If you’re not here with me”), “Christmas Just Ain’t Christmas Without the One You Love,” at least two really good songs with “Lonely Christmas” in the title (by the Moonglows and the Orioles), and the David Letterman fave “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” which is sung with exuberance by Darlene Love and all those who have followed her, but nonetheless says someone needs a little Christmas and isn’t getting it.
Joni Mitchell’s wistful “River” has become a favorite with its poetic take on this dilemma, and wistful is also a good term for “Toyland,” a eulogy for the innocence of youth. It’s perhaps a little surprising that the Everly Brothers’s fine 1972 declaration “Christmas Eve Can Kill You” never caught on. But Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me” did, putting a clever Christmas twist on the Shirelles’s classic and wary musical question “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”
It’s perhaps surprising that a warning about mass starvation, Band-Aid’s 1984 fund-raiser “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, remains a holiday standard almost 40 years later. Apparently a catchy hook can work the same wonders at Christmastime that it does the rest of the year.
Country music, as we might expect, has delivered a number of songs recalling hard times at Christmas. In Bill Anderson’s “Po’ Folks Christmas,” “We all sat down to write Santa a note / But Santa don’t come to see po’ folks.” Fortunately, this isn’t Dickens, so faith and good old-fashioned pluck can almost always save the day. Dolly Parton’s “Hard Candy Christmas” is presumably something she now only sings about.
What may be most telling about the troubled side of Christmas tales, though, are the threads of darkness tucked into songs that routinely make it into upbeat playlists.
One of the best Christmas songs ever, “Someday at Christmas” — written by Ron Miller and Bryan Wells and first sung by Stevie Wonder — seems optimistic enough until we realize it’s less a declaration of hope than a litany of all the things we haven’t fixed in the whole history of humanity, like war and hungry children. Will we ever get it right? “Maybe not in time for you and me,” Wonder sings. Good guess.
The oft-recorded “Last Christmas” may envision a better Christmas, but the previous one was pretty rotten. John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” begins with a question that implicitly answers itself: “So this is Christmas / And what have you done?” It remains an unintended and inevitable counterpoint to Paul McCartney’s relentlessly cheerful “Wonderful Christmastime.”
It takes nothing from the narrative skills and proudly jaded worldview of the late Shane MacGowan to say he was neither the first nor last to cast a dissenting vote on the most wonderful time of the year. Nor does that only include grouchy composers of modern secular pop songs.
“We Three Kings,” written in 1857 by The Rev. John Henry Hopkins Jr., rector of an Episcopalian church in Williamsport, Pa., is widely considered the first American-authored Christmas carol. Hopkins catalogs the gifts given to the Christ child by the three kings and when he gets to myrrh — presented by Balthazar, for those keeping score — it goes down like this: “Myrrh is mine / Its bitter perfume / Breathes a life of gathering gloom / Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying / Sealed in the stone cold tomb.”
While The Rev. Hopkins presumably had sound theological grounding for that verse, that’s strong stuff to be laying on a newborn. One hundred and sixty-six years later, it makes “A Fairytale of New York” sound like “Jingle Bell Rock.”
