Perusing painkillers at CVS the morning after Thanksgiving, I should not have been surprised by the telltale clattering of horse hooves thundering over the sound system.
Never mind that last night’s dinner was barely digested. Of course I would be hearing those sleigh bells jingling, ring-ting-tingling, too. Our unspoken societal contract decrees it: Until midnight on Jan. 1, like it or not, the soundtrack of the season is an endless medley of Yuletide cheer.
But how cheerful is it, really? It seems a heresy to say so out loud, but isn’t all holiday music, even “Santa Baby,” sort of depressing?
Don’t worry, I’m not here to bah humbug the most wonderful time of the year. I would just like to argue that not only are most Christmas songs a little sad, but that’s actually part of what we love about the season.
As much as the popular imagination (and the retail sector) insists on gingerbread house-building, egg nog-sipping and Secret Santa gift-exchanging, the holidays are an emotional layer cake. Amid those tidings of comfort and joy are tidings of loneliness, familial tension and obligation. Underneath the tinsel and gelt, we roil with mixed feelings.
There are plenty of objectively sad songs that tackle this tension head on, and they are, each and every one, heartbreaking. There’s something exquisite about languishing in the soldier’s longing of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” in gazing out a cold window imagining ourselves the forlorn lovers of Joni Mitchell’s “River” and Wham’s “Last Christmas.”
Each year I’m devastated anew by Vince Guaraldi’s maudlin piano plinking softly under the opening line of “A Charlie Brown Christmas”: “I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus, Christmas is coming, but I’m not happy.” Still I tune in. I always feel blue after watching, but it’s a sorrow that feels compulsory.
Even without the holidays, the final month of the year is a melancholy affair. In the northeast where I live, the minutes of daylight dwindle, the vegetation decreases, and we reckon with the contents of the year that was. (More gravely, seasonal depression peaks.)
This was inscribed in me early with George Winston’s 1982 solo piano album “December,” which contains some Christmas songs and some terrifically sad original tracks. His quiet arpeggios implied a vast winterscape one might wander alone, leaving but a pair of bootprints in the freshly driven snow — a vision I, age 8, found immensely appealing in my moony suburban reverie.
And nostalgia simmers under the surface, too. Every Christmas (or other seasonal holiday) contains within it all those that came before it. This Christmas contains all the Christmas Eves of your childhood when you couldn’t fall asleep for the anticipation of opening the gifts under the tree. It contains the first winter break you came home from college and hung out with your high school friends again — or the first holiday your own kids came home after moving out.
It’s wonderful and terrible, how much things have changed, how much time has passed. And abiding through it all? “Jingle Bell Rock.” “White Christmas.” “Carol of the Bells.” Whatever record your family played while you lit the candles or decorated the tree. It doesn’t matter if these songs aren’t explicitly sad. The fact that they’ve persisted while we have changed so much makes them inherently devastating, and gorgeous too. And once a year, we marinate in them for a month and change.
My holiday playlist is called “Blue Christmas,” not after the Elvis classic, but the Bright Eyes version from 2002, which, in Conor Oberst’s devastating warble, is even more affecting. I like the standards from the Tin Pan Alley troubadours, but I’m partial these days to holiday albums by contemporary artists. Low’s “Christmas” album. Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings’s “It’s a Holiday Soul Party.” Fleet Foxes’s “A Very Lonely Solstice.” These albums are becoming my new classics because they’re fresh and less encumbered by the emotional freight of the holidays that preceded them.
But even the newer tunes become tinged with nostalgia after a year or two of heavy holiday rotation. Which is, I now accept, part of the bargain: Everybody knows the turkey and the mistletoe help to make the season bright, but we should probably admit that the season comes with its own beautiful melancholy, too. If holiday music isn’t any less lovely for the swell of emotions it inspires, the holidays aren’t any less bright for the shadows they contain.
Melissa Kirsch covers wellness and lifestyle and writes The Morning newsletter on Saturdays.
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