CityNews cinema writer SIMON COBCROFT has a secret life: Christmas music tragic. Over four decades he’s listened to more than 14,000 Christmas songs and arrived at a playlist (which he’s happy to share) of 17 hours of the 359 songs he reckons are worth listening to.  

And so this is Christmas…
So sang John Lennon with his wife and the Harlem community choir, on a balmy October
day in 1971.

It is now one of the many Christmas pop staples played every Christmas around the world; accumulating more than 613 million streams on Spotify, as of this week.

But Christmas pop has often had a bad rap, excuse the pun. Sometime in the eighties, when I was living in a share house in Newcastle, I got into an argument with a guy who swore that no one had every recorded a good Christmas pop song.

I decided to prove him wrong by making a mix-tape of Christmas songs from my record collection. For anyone under 40, a mix-tape was like putting together a Spotify playlist but, in practice, more
laboriously like putting MP3s on a USB stick while your computer intermittently crashes.

Anyway, Scrooge McChristmas wasn’t swayed. But thus began my obsessive quest to collate the ultimate Christmas playlist.

Four decades on, I have sifted through more than 14,000 Christmas songs to coal the bad and select the good to put on my Christmas playlist. I now humbly believe it to be the greatest collection of Christmas pop songs ever released. I have 359 songs (17 hours of music) that reflect the diversity and evolution of the Christmas pop song.

The list is in the order that I have compiled it over the years but is thematically organised so that one song flows naturally to the next. I figure you can always put it on shuffle-play if you want to access more recent releases sooner. You’ll also forgive me for the last few songs, as I’m still thematically organising this month’s releases.

But there is everything from pop to punk, from country to calypso and from reggae to rap.

And I haven’t been Triple-J snotty about it either. You’ll find Mariah, Biebs and Tay-Tay in there, too. If it’s got energy or attitude, or an infectious pull on par with COVID, it’s in. So too if it plucks the strings of your heart or tugs at your tear ducts.

Unfortunately though, a number of songs I have on record are not available on Spotify, so there are some gaps.

The list starts with the song that pioneered Christmas pop, the world’s best-selling single up until 1997 –  Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. Before that, there was no such thing as a best-selling Christmas pop song.

Sure, people had written Christmas pop songs prior to this, but they weren’t big sellers. In fact, record companies couldn’t see the financial sense in putting out a record that would only sell for a few months in the year.

That is until Irving Berlin twigged that those few months occurred every year and with the right record you could re-release it every Christmas and make a motza.

So, in 1940, Berlin sat down and thought, “how can I write a Christmas song that everyone, even Jewish people like me who don’t celebrate Christmas, will like?”

His answer? Firstly, make it about winter holidays with fun in the snow rather than a crying baby in a grubby stable in the Middle East. Secondly, appeal to nostalgia; of a family-orientated golden past
that is sadly missing in the modern world. Yes folks, the nostalgia business has been going on for that long.

By the time the song was released in 1942, Berlin was not to know that soulful reflection was exactly what every American wanted, as they grimly faced a wartime Christmas with loved ones overseas.

White Christmas went on to be featured in the movie, Holiday Inn, which formed the template for all Christmas movies to follow – warm, light-hearted and most importantly, not focused on religion.

Christmas carols with secular backgrounds

In a sense this secularisation of Christmas music has been going on for centuries, as a lot of
the old Christmas carols we know have secular backgrounds.

Jingle Bells (1857) was a drinking song written for American Thanksgiving and was most commonly sung by sloshed men in taverns, with the original verses about drunken misfortune in the snow:

A day or two ago,
The story I must tell,

A gent was riding by,
In a one-horse open sleigh,
He laughed as there I sprawling lie,
And quickly drove away,

Ha, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells…

Deck The Halls is another secular song from 1862 with plenty of reference to drinking in the original Welsh version which translates as:

The best pleasure is this time,
A house, a fire and friends,
A warmed heart from much brown ale,
and singing beautiful songs.

As all religious people know, the devil has the best music and our modern corporate Lucifers are no different in serving up secular Christmas bangers that can’t help but tempt the faithful to get down with their bad self. Mariah ain’t no pariah when it comes to uniting the pews to get up and dance.

Look, it’s no bad thing. I’m not religious (in fact, music is my religion) but I support the idea of a final month of the year where people of all faiths can join in. Where we can unwind, have fun and reflect on the year past. And, for this year in particular, slam the door on its sorry arse.

I’m happy to celebrate Chinese New Year in January, or Islamic New Year in August or Jewish New Year in September, but there’s a certain charm and logic to celebrating the last calendar month of the year.

And as no one still believes in the Roman gods, no one should be offended, or at least we should all be equally offended, that the vast majority of the world sticks with the Western calendar Julius Caesar introduced in 46 BC, that has months named after Roman gods, festivals and rulers. It’s hardly a Christian thing.

And besides, the Bible doesn’t even place Christ’s birth in a cold northern December. Shepherds don’t watch their flocks of sheep in winter, and the national Roman census, that Joseph and Mary supposedly came to Bethlehem to register in, took place in summer. The Bible has no record of the birth date of Jesus, but the passing references that do exist seem to point to him being born in June.

Saturnalia was an end-of-year booze-up 

You see, historically, Christmas was introduced to replace the Roman festival of Saturnalia after Emperor Constantine converted the Roman empire to Christianity in AD 312. Saturnalia celebrated the agricultural god, Saturn and was an end-of-year booze-up on December 25 to mark the winter solstice and send out the year.

We similarly end each week on Saturday or Saturn’s day. Saturnalia (which I also noticed was mentioned in Keeping Up the ACT, last week) was a time where businesses shut down for two days, where everyone put on massive banquets, where slaves could rest and feast at their master’s tables, where gifts were given to friends and family (called sigillaria) and where much drinking and merriment occurred.

Sound familiar? It’s basically, what most of us wage-slaves still do at this time of the year, regardless of religion.

And what better way to accompany that, than with some bauble bangers to lift our spirits?

So, here’s to a songful Saturnalia, a carolful Christmas, a harmonic Hanukah, a percussive
Pancha Ganapati, a keyboard-driven Kwanzaa and an orchestral Ōmisoka.

I hope you enjoy my playlist. And if you don’t, I know who you are. You really need to
concede that you lost the argument, Scrooge McChristmas.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6mv4KtN3swEam4z0f1BaFQ