Jingle Hell

Kidding! No, I think the transition takes place a couple weeks before Thanksgiving, which gives us all plenty of time to get sick of our seasonal favorites long before the season officially begins. The all-Christmas programming used to start Thanksgiving week. And before that, many years ago, it began the weekend after Thanksgiving. This is in keeping with the familiar chronological acceleration that nowadays places the tubby rubber Santas up against the plastic jack-o’-lanterns on the shelves at the local CVS, right next to the back-to-school supplies, which will soon be replaced by Valentine candy.

I dislike the acceleration of Christmas as much as anyone else, but with no access to a Pandora account and lacking satellite radio in my car, I listen to the station all the same, until I can’t stand it anymore. Like the season itself, my moment of Christmas-music overfeeding arrives earlier and earlier with each passing year. In a few years I will be driving around shouting for the death of the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir before Columbus Day. But I am captive to the station’s programming long enough to notice a few things. Chief among them is that during the modern Christmas season you can’t get away from Mariah Carey. Even now, many years after the salad days of her career began to wilt, she’s like our generation’s Queen of Christmas—or the new Mrs. Claus. Or the Transitioning Santa. She’s everywhere.

Her status rests on the song “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” released 21 years ago as of this writing and perhaps the only Christmas song written in the last 40 years to show the staying power of a standard, like “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” or “The Christmas Song.” Mariah Carey wrote “All I Want” with a collaborator. He arranged it, produced it, and, through the miracle of digital programming, played all the instruments. But it is Mariah who filled the crucial role, not as singer but as Yuletide sex kitten: She appeared in a music video that has become a feature of the season almost as indelible as the song itself. In it she is seen disporting—I’m sorry, there’s no other word for it—along winter landscapes in a snug-fitting snowsuit and then donning a Santa’s cap and red velvet miniskirt and crossing her legs enthusiastically in the ample lap of Santa himself. He looks extremely jolly, and why not?

“Make my wish come true,” she sings, in the emphatic tones of an oil barge lost in a fog bank. “All I want for Christmas is you, baby.” I can listen to the song more often than most of the songs our all-Christmas radio station plays—roughly twice as often, for example, as I can listen to Bon Jovi singing “Back Door Santa.” It’s a catchy rave-up with an impressive rhythm section, even when you know the tom toms and snappy snare are really just the electronic pulsations of a drum machine. And while it’s more successful than most Christmas songs of its time, it is representative of them, too. Mostly in this: It doesn’t have anything to do with Christmas.

By design, according to Mariah Carey’s cowriter, “All I Want” is a bit of musical misdirection, a love song swaddled in Christmas clothes (velvet miniskirt, Santa cap). The seasonal references to reindeer and snow and Santa and Christmas trees are used as a means to convey the singer’s earthier, and less Christmassy, need for a hunk-a hunk-a burning love. At first glance, of course, this is a much more marketable yearning than the yearning Christmas is supposed to give rise to. It could be worse. I think of a version of “O Holy Night” released over a decade ago by one of Mariah Carey’s early imitators, Christina Aguilera. Her recording of this old and explicitly Christian hymn was probably intended as an assertion of piety, but it might be the biggest blow to the Christian religion since the Turks overran the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071.

To convey her depth of religious feeling, Christina borrows her mentor’s signature vocal trick, using several notes to sing a single syllable. Musicologists call it melisma. It is an old technique, common to Gregorian chants from long ago, but it’s more familiar to contemporary audiences through the vein-popping exertions of the late Whitney Houston and countless singers who have kneecapped our national anthem before televised sporting events. As the singer slides around in search of the note to match the syllable, melisma can sound to the amateur ear—mine anyway—like someone handed a pennywhistle to a meth-head.

So it is with Christina Aguilera when she opens fire at “O Holy Night.” The problem with melisma, at least as it’s done now, is that it draws attention to the singer and away from the song, an effect that is especially crippling in Christmas music, which is, according to tradition anyway, supposed to be about something other than self. I know nothing of her religious convictions, but Christina Aguilera certainly sounds sincere, or enthusiastic at least. She takes some of her syllables—the “lee-ee-ee-ee” in “holy,” for instance—on a roller-coaster ride of 9 or 10 quarter notes until her voice flies off the rails and goes crashing down on the next syllable: “na-ah–ah–ah–ttttt!” For the last 12 bars a gospel piano vamps behind her as she scats on “Jee-jeee-jeeeee-zuz .  .  . oh! .  .  . Jeeezzzussss uh-Churist .  .  . ” You can’t tell whether she wants to praise Him or date Him.

When it comes to Christmas, then, Mariah Carey and the other melisma mamas might be right to leave Jesus out of it altogether and settle instead into Santa’s lap for three minutes of forelock tugging. Most singers and songwriters do the same, avoiding piety in favor of a frolic. This is the common course contemporary Christmas music has traveled over the last several decades. The most prominent trend has been toward what the music industry calls the “novelty song”—a ditty so insubstantial that it wobbles from funny to infuriating in 32 bars. Excellent examples of novelties in the secular songbook are “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” and “Disco Duck” from ye olden times on up to the more recent “Rock Me Amadeus” and “Crazy Frog.” And so my all-Christmas station sputters with “The Chipmunk Song,” “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” “Here Comes Santa Claus,” and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” If Weird Al Yankovic suddenly converted and took responsibility for writing all our new Christmas songs, he could do no worse than “Be Claus I Got High,” “I Want a Boob Job for Christmas,” or “Daddy Please (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas).”

In a way, these are simply successors to such non-Christmas Christmas classics as “Jingle Bells,” “Silver Bells,” “Let It Snow,” and “Frosty the Snowman”—songs that, respectively, are about antique modes of transportation, seasonal decorations in a department store, the weather, and the creepy resuscitation of inanimate objects. The closest we get to the source of the holiday are Christmas songs that celebrate the celebration of Christmas, which is to say: songs that are at least two removes from the actual event. “The Christmas Waltz” tells us “it’s that time of year when the world falls in love,” but why does the world fall in love? We are told to have ourselves a merry little Christmas, but the song doesn’t tell us why our Christmas, big or little, is supposed to be merry. And what’s the significance of a winter wonderland, besides the new bird replacing the blue bird?

We live in a secular age, a post-Christian age. We attend “winter festivals,” throw “holiday parties,” use “season’s greetings” as the all-purpose salutation. Our public schools, our government, and our retail outlets have purged Christmas of its religious meaning. Why not purge our Christmas music, too? But I think something else is going on as well. If we insist that we treat this religious holiday exclusively with a secular levity, through rock-and-roll come-ons and joke songs, we might get the impression that we can’t use levity to treat religious matters. If singers and musicians think they can be jolly only by de-Christianizing Christmas, then we might begin to believe that the only way to appreciate its true significance is to sound as miserable as Christina Aguilera in full melisma mode. We might even begin to believe that fun (pleasure, delight, enjoyment of the wonders of the world) is the opposite of religion. And come to think of it, most people already do believe this. Especially Christians.

It’s an old problem, of course—an old problem even for Christmas music. In the early church, Christmas replaced the baptism of Jesus as the preeminent celebration of the season because it stood as a happy rebuke to the Manicheans. Believing as they did in the absolute division of spirit and matter, no group of heretics has ever been gloomier. The celebration of Christmas was a way of telling the world: This really happened, to a real mother and a real child, made in flesh and blood, the coming together of God and man. And music itself is the natural expression of the union of spirit and matter, the physical act of plucking strings or hammering keys or thrumming vocal cords to produce something that points beyond the physical. Unless you use a drum machine.

No other holiday is so intimately connected to music, so quickly evoked by a simple melody or even mere sounds—sleigh bells or the immense whispering of snowfall at night. The idea of Christmas as a musical celebration finally took hold when peasants and other lowly folk began adapting local dance tunes to the purpose. The origin of Christmas music in dance music is worth remembering. The tunes, outfitted with words of praise and the appropriate narratives of Jesus and Mary and Joseph, of the Three Kings and the shepherds, were an effusion of popular piety—and a rebellion against the grim impositions of church hierarchy throughout Germany and, later, England. A good carol, said the great musicologist Percy Deamer, “was witness to the spirit of a more spontaneous and undoubting faith.” The effusions were organic, growing from the bottom up, and like the Gospels themselves, filled with metaphors taken from field and hearth:

Deamer traced the word “carol” back through old French to the Greek word for “an encircling dance.” Movement and dynamism and joy were the essential attributes, inseparable from the religious meaning. The message of Christmas was the Christian message, too: the Light coming into the world and the darkness proving powerless against it. What’s not to celebrate? Why not dance?

“To take life”—and hence Christmas—”with real seriousness is to take it joyfully,” Deamer went on. “For seriousness is only sad when it is superficial: the carol is thus nearer to the truth because it is jolly.” The opposite isn’t necessarily true, by the way. “All I Want for Christmas Is You” might be described as jolly; no one would describe it as serious. “Joy to the World,” on the other hand, is both. A Christmas carol is meant to liberate us from phony seriousness and phony good cheer.

In the past that lesson has often been lost, at times even more thoroughly than in our own day—a reminder that should cheer us up, if you’ll forgive the expression. The serious joy, or the joyful seriousness, of Christmas is offensive to the grim Christian. When Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans seized power from a pious English king, one of their first official acts was to ban Christmas observances of any kind. A pamphleteering divine named Hezekiah Woodward explained the reasoning.

Christmas Day, he wrote, is “the old Heathen’s Feasting Day, in honor of Saturn their Idol God, the Papist’s Massing Day, the Profane Man’s Ranting Day, the Superstitious Man’s Idol Day, the Multitude’s Idle Day, Satan’s Working Day, the True Christian Man’s Fasting Day.” With all that competition, the best option for a “True Christian Man” was to hunker down on Christmas Eve, forswear meat and drink, and wait for December 26. Singing—particularly singing songs of joy—was out of the question. “We are persuaded, no one thing more hinderest the Gospel work all the yearlong, than doth the observation of that Idol Day once in a year.” Imagine what they would have done with Mariah Carey!

“Yule tide is fool tide,” went the Puritans’ dismissive slogan (which was truer than the Puritans knew, probably, if you give “fool” the meaning St. Paul gave it when he told us to be “fools for Christ’s sake”). And once in a while, at Christmas, buried in tinsel and credit card receipts, a practicing Christian might be tempted to agree. It’s a familiar human paradox that the phony good cheer of secular Christmas increases even as the genuine joy of Christmas recedes; the music of the holiday grows more insistent and frenetic even as it moves further away from its origin in true delight. The question is why a secular culture bothers to write and sing and play Christmas music at all.

G.K. Chesterton wondered the same thing. How does music sprung from the loam of Christian observance survive the banalities of the post-Christian age? One answer—Chesterton’s answer—is that we don’t live in a post-Christian age after all, not really. More to the point, it’s impossible to live in a post-Christian age. Some things can’t be undone, and chief among them is the Light that was lit the first Christmas morning, while choirs of angels sang above. It can be ridiculed and parodied, satirized and scoffed at, obscured and sentimentalized, but it won’t be extinguished. So even a secular age continues to go through the motions, singing the same songs, sometimes the old songs, without quite knowing why.

“The great majority,” Chesterton wrote, “will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and suddenly one day they will wake up and discover why.”

Who knows when or how? But every now and then an image pops to mind when I listen to my all-Christmas radio station. I like to think of a sophisticated fellow, impatient with religion and educated in the contemporary manner, walking, let’s say, past a church in a December twilight, maybe musing about Mariah’s snowsuit or wondering how Grandma got run over, and then perhaps he will linger for a moment and sneak a peek at the manger scene, throw a glance into the crib, and hear the strains of the carol from within: Mild, He lays His glory by, / born that man no more may die. And suddenly he will wake up and discover why.

“Wait a minute!” he will say. “All I want for Christmas is You!”

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard. This essay is adapted from a chapter in The Christmas Virtues: A Treasury of Conservative Tales for the Holidays, edited by Jonathan V. Last (Templeton Press).