TodayChristmas Top 40 seems set in stone
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As with anything else, there's more than one way to look at the Christmas season.
Since it's the biggest holiday of the year, it's a time to bask in friendship and fellowship. Since the custom is to exchange gifts, it's a time during which we are excessively preoccupied with shopping.
And since the holiday season comes complete with its own repertory of music, it's a time to hear all those old favorites once again. Especially over the speakers in all the stores we're spending so much time visiting in search of gifts.
We're still in the accepting phase of the Christmas music cycle, but it's already been nearly two weeks since the carols started in earnest. By the time Christmas gets here, one too many background-music versions of "Jingle Bells" could rouse the inner Scrooge in the best of us.
There are literally thousands of distinct Christmas songs, but you can go to the display of holiday CDs in a record store — heck, in a supermarket — and pick out one album with the 15 or 20 songs you're most likely to hear at this time of year. And that lineup of carols probably isn't any different this year than it was 40 years ago.
This prompted Charles Passy of the Palm Beach Post to ask the musical question: Why haven't any new Christmas songs joined the list of holiday standards?
There are new Christmas songs written every year, usually served up alongside a batch of more familiar ones, performed by everybody from the biggest musical stars to the garage band down the street.
But as Passy notes, the newest Christmas songs that an average person could actually recall are probably "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" and possibly "Do They Know It's Christmastime (Feed the World)." Those are from the early 1980s. If you include the 1970s, you can add John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" and Jose Feliciano's "Feliz Navidad."
Leaving aside traditional carols, the Christmas standards from the 20th century tend to be from the 1930s to the 1950s, from "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" back to "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" and "The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)."
By contrast, the 1990s and the 2000s have been a bust, with the possible exception of Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You," which remains high on the holiday charts at the iTunes Music Store but isn't something you're likely to hear carolers singing outside your door.
Some would say the '30s to the '50s were the golden age of songwriting — Irving Berlin, Cole Porter — and that's why you have to go back that far to find classic Christmas songs. There may be something to that, but it didn't take Jerome Kern to write that "Grandma" song, and it's pretty popular.
It may be more about the wider variety in entertainment sources. The Christmas standards from the '30s through the '50s had the advantage of being played on the national radio networks, before the age of TV, and in the movies.
Nowadays there are 10,000 radio stations offering dozens of formats and 250 or so TV networks, not to mention half a dozen theatrical movies a week and the entire Internet. It takes a concentrated effort cutting across all these media to create a hit song — and at least in America, there doesn't seem to be any will to promote songs that are only likely to be heard for four weeks.
In Britain it's a different story. People still get excited wondering what song is going to be No. 1 at Christmastime. The song may not always be a holiday tune, but many British artists have cut Christmas songs to try and win this particular sweepstakes.
This particular custom is one of the plot threads in the romantic comedy "Love Actually," in which a washed-up '70s rock star tries to revive his career by re-recording the old Troggs hit "Love is All Around" and changing the words to "Christmas is All Around." It's laughably bad — but that's part of its charm.
In England, there are plans to release the song as a single to see if life can imitate art. By contrast, the American version of the soundtrack CD doesn't even list the song on the cover.
When you consider there's room in the marketplace for "Bad Santa," starring Billy Bob Thornton as an alcoholic safecracker who plays Santa as a cover for his criminal activities, it's probably fair to assume the Brits have no corner on irony.
But they apparently have more of an appetite for Christmas songs — even consciously bad ones.
It's unlikely Universal, the media conglomerate behind "Love Actually," could turn "Christmas is All Around" into this year's "White Christmas," although the cross-promotion possibilities are otherwise all in place.
But eventually some new song, probably a better one, is going to get a similar opportunity, and there will be a new entry in the Christmas Top 40. In the meantime, "Jingle Bells" will do just fine, thanks.
