A lot of cultural Christmas stuff isn’t really Christmas stuff at all. No, we’re not talking about Die Hard. The dizzying thriller takes place at that time of year. The characters refer to Christmas. It matters not a whit that the story finds no place for Baby Jesus. A better argument can be made against It’s a Wonderful Life, but I’m not sure I’m brave enough to make it.
Oh, all right then. Frank Capra’s justly revered classic is the potted story of a man’s life within a mere framing sequence at the merry time. That’s all. Following an introduction that has the citizens of Bedford Falls praying for George Bailey on Christmas Eve, it takes about an hour and 15 minutes for us to get back to the season. Okay, my heart isn’t in it. You can have that.
The real swizz here relates to wrongly classified songs. And this has been going on forever. Hear me out. Jingle Bells is not a Christmas song. It is certainly not – as I’ve seen claimed once or twice – a Christmas carol. My advisers tells me the lyrics, first published as The One Horse Open Sleigh in 1857, were originally associated with Thanksgiving. Sure enough. There is a lot about dashing through the snow. Bells on bobtails are ringing. But there are no fat men with snowy beards or pregnant ladies lodging in stables.
Jingle Bells belongs to a large class of winter songs that have been shuffled cynically on to the Christmas playlist. Think also of Winter Wonderland. You can “frolic and play, the Eskimo way” in January or February. It need not be Christmas for Parson Brown to do the job when he’s in town. It is shameful of Tony Bennett – a man I won’t otherwise hear a word against – to include it on his classic Snowfall LP (the best old-school-crooner Christmas album, but that’s next week’s column).
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Frosty the Snowman? Baby, It’s Cold Outside? Let It Snow? You’re not fooling anyone. Each one of you is working a bleeding fraud on decent people just trying to have a Christmas singalong. You belong on Perry Como’s winter album, not Perry Como’s Christmas album. If you hear Jingle Bell Rock in your local off-licence make sure to storm to the counter and complain. You’re certain to be thanked for your diligence.
Still, those songs do, at least, allude to the season in which northern hemispheric Christmas takes place. They may not make much sense in Australia, but the listener is being positioned at the right end of the year.
Shame on those alleged Christmas pop songs that don’t even manage that much. Two UK Christmas number ones stand out from the pack here. First we have Stay Another Day, from the perky, postcode-alluding popsters East 17. It doesn’t take long to go through the lyrics of the 1994 hit (as I have just done). The song comprises four or five ways of saying “don’t go” repeated over a gently insistent melody. The plea could plausibly be made at Easter, Whitsun or Halloween.
Tony Mortimer, East 17′s driving force, was, however, never taken for any kind of fool. Aware the single was due for release in late November, the band inserted a few Christmas bells and dressed up in gleaming white parkas for the snowy video. That’s why you still hear it when you’re buying a power tool for your Uncle Gerry’s Christmas present.
Frankie Goes to Hollywood didn’t even bother with bells when unleashing The Power of Love on the world 10 years earlier. The band owned 1984. Following on from Relax and Two Tribes, both staggering hits, their third release of the year, a lachrymose ballad given epic sweep by Trevor Horn’s production, was always going to be huge, but why not boost it further still with an injection of X-Mas steroids?
The video re-enacted the Nativity. The cover of the 12in single – honouring that story’s key player in a different setting – featured Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin. There are no Christmas sounds in the arrangement. The lyrics make no explicit reference to even the time of year. Yet the song still finds its way on to all the seasonal compilations. How many listeners in 2024 have seen the video? Does any stop to wonder why this odd song is sandwiched between Shakin’ Stevens’s Merry Christmas Everyone and Paul McCartney’s Wonderful Christmastime?
We can hardly blame the Frankies and the Easts for getting on that train. Our desire to make any Christmas culture immortal defies all reason. Films as bad as Last Christmas (that Wham! jukebox musical) and Santa Claus: The Movie (execrable froth from 1985) recovered from underwhelming releases to become endlessly replayed seasonal comfort food. Score a Christmas hit and you’ll never be hungry again.
