When Christmas Music, Which is Good, Hits Notes That Are Bad

While over-the-air radio stations may be an endangered species these days, it’s fair to say that come December every year in New York, radio station WLTW (Lite-FM) and its all-Christmas programming remains the sound of the city.

It’s also fair to say that one of the strategies by which Lite maintains this domination is by playing many of the same songs over and over.

Top-40 radio, of course, has employed that bedrock tenet forever, on the premise that anyone who tunes in at any time should soon hear the top hits. If you think it might be different with Christmas music, which incorporates thousands of songs over multiple decades, you would be wrong.

Jim Ryan, long the skilled programmer of Lite-FM’s Christmas lineup, explained years ago that oddly enough, only a small handful of those songs are acceptable to the whole range of the mass popular music audience. There might be 30 or so, he mused, and those always formed the core of Lite-FM’s holiday playlist, at least for its first few weeks.

This minimizes the chance listeners will hear a song they dislike so much that they turn the radio off or switch to another source — the nightmare moment for all radio programmers.

What this strategy also creates, however, is a flip side: As comforting and soothing as Christmas music can feel, some of it is hard to listen to.

I’ve liked Christmas music since we sang “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” off-key in Sunday school and my parents correctly guessed that 9-year-old me would love “The Chipmunk Song.” Sixty-plus years later, I don’t need to hear “The Chipmunk Song” ever again — as if that’s an option — and I’ve caught enough Christmas music to have built up a reject pile.

Here’s a little of what might be near the top of that pile:

1. “You’re Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” Thurl Ravenscroft. Ravenscroft had a fascinating career and was a wonderful bass singer who enhanced many fine harmony records. “Mr. Grinch,” despite its clever wordplay, stops me dead for two interminable minutes and 56 seconds.

2. “Santa Baby,” Madonna. Eartha Kitt nailed this one — the best Santa seduction ever. Madonna turns it into a novelty record, a Betty Boop cartoon that erases all its charm. On the other hand, my wife likes it.

3. “Christmas Time is Here,” Vince Guaraldi Trio. I know, I know, everyone who loves the Charlie Brown Christmas specials smiles at this one. To me it sounds downbeat and melancholy, and while there’s a lot of that in “Peanuts,” I find “Christmas Time” depressing and a little unsettling.

4. “Wonderful Christmastime,” Paul McCartney. Nice catchy melody, which is McCartney’s genius, but the lyrics turn it into it a silly Christmas song. It’s irresistible to muse on how Paul wrote this relentlessly upbeat celebration while John Lennon wrote “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” which begins “So this is Christmas / And what you have you done?”

5. “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” Carpenters. While my friend Bill correctly notes this one is dreary enough to implode on its own, it also illustrates a deeper trap: slowing Christmas songs down to an unbearable crawl. The thinking, presumably, is that this makes them poignant. It almost never does. It makes them tedious. As another friend Marge once remarked, “Don’t sing them like dirges.”

Now all this is, of course, subjective. It’s just me. I get nothing from Connie Francis singing “Baby’s First Christmas,” but if you just had your first in September, it could be your Hallmark moment. Fair enough.

To confirm I’m not the only one particular about holiday music, I’m pretty sure Irving Berlin did not love the version of “White Christmas” by Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, where they punctuate the song with “dip-dip-dip-de-dip-de-dip” instead of Bing Crosby’s pristine chimes. Unlike me, Irving did get to console himself by cashing royalty checks.

It’s also true that with Christmas music as with any other music, or pizza toppings for that matter, not all our personal favorites dwell in the mainstream. Or, in the case of Christmas music, in the Lite-FM top 30. I’m not expecting most radio stations to play Emmylou Harris’s “Angel Eyes” or the Country Gentlemen’s “Christmas Time Back Home” or Johnny Preston’s “I Want a New Baby for Christmas” or the Moonglows’s “Just a Lonely Christmas.” Or the lovely Charles Brown original of “Please Come Home For Christmas.” Or even Butterbeans and Susie’s incomparable “Papa Ain’t No Santa Claus.” I am reasonably sure “Papa Ain’t No Santa Claus” would drive a measurable number of Lite-FM listeners out of the room. No matter. For me, it’s part of the season.

In any case, most Christmas songs are neither transcendent nor terrible. They fall in the middle, and the more so because we know them from, well, last Christmas and the Christmas before.

Yes, the Drifters’s radical arrangement of “White Christmas” — clipped from Jimmy Ricks and the Ravens — tosses the Bing Crosby version into a blender. The Three Tenors don’t sound like John Lennon singing “Happy Xmas.” One reason Phil Spector’s 1963 Christmas album remains in heavy rotation today is that no one in the last 61 years has matched it.

Still, it’s significant that Spector populated the record with songs everyone knew, like “Sleigh Ride” and “Winter Wonderland.” The only original is Darlene Love’s tour de force “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).”

Truth is, most Christmas recordings play it safe, sticking to familiar material and familiar arrangements, whether it’s “Oh Holy Night” or “Baby It’s Cold Outside.”

“Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” the Johnny Marks song introduced by Brenda Lee in 1958, has since been recorded by more than 400 artists. Listen to Jessie J, Nick Carter, Pentatonix, Michael Buble, Kasey Musgraves, Miley Cyrus, or almost any of the others, and you’re hearing a very similar record, with a different voice and maybe a tweak or two to the beat.

If you like Bobby Helms’s original “Jingle Bell Rock,” it’s hard to dislike Kelly Clarkson’s version. New voice, same template.

Where in most of popular music we’re looking for the next big thing, with Christmas music we almost always prefer the last big thing. “White Christmas” was the defining holiday song for more than a decade before Nat King Cole’s version of “The Christmas Song” came along, and that one arguably remained the anthem before Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” blew into the room in 1994. In keeping with Christmas tradition, we didn’t all love Mariah at first and then that changed. Billboard has run 70 holiday music charts and “All I Want for Christmas Is You” has been №1 for 62 of them.

It’s not my favorite Christmas song ever. But I’ll listen and enjoy it, especially since it means another two minutes and 56 seconds without the Grinch.