Trite Christmas: back to the future with the corny playlists of our youth

”Strange how potent cheap music is,” muses Amanda in Noël Coward’s Private Lives. How perfectly this encapsulates the way I feel the first time I hear Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody” – usually around the start of Advent and probably in a department store when I’ve ventured into “the city” (as Norwich is known around these parts) in an attempt to beat the crowds.

Now I appreciate that I might be alone in feeling slightly warm, fuzzy and excited, even a bit misty-eyed when Noddy Holder asks if you’re “hanging up your stocking on the wall” (who actually does that? – it’s the end of the bed in our house), but stay with me.

“Once in Royal David’s City”, at the start of Carols from King’s, is a more conventional conduit for lifting up our hearts as we contemplate the birth of Our Lord. But there’s something about these old Christmas pop songs, cheesy as a truckle of Stilton, the aural equivalent of George Orwell’s “good bad books”, that twangs at my lowbrow heartstrings.

I’ve a fondness for many of them, even those now spurned by their auteurs. Take Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (1984). Cruelly rejected today as a smug car crash of colonialism, slightly racist stereotypes and geographical illiteracy, Bob Geldof himself has called it “one of the worst songs in history”. Yet I only have to hear the opening chimes to feel awash with sentiment, sympathy for those enduring wretched conditions at this time of year and nostalgia for a simpler time when we didn’t have Google to check if there’d be snow in Africa at Christmas. (The Atlas Mountains in Morocco and Algeria, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and the higher elevations of South Africa and Lesotho, if you’re interested.)

Ditto “Wonderful Christmastime” (1980). There are entire threads on Reddit dedicated to why people hate this song. It’s derided by one music blogger as “Paul McCartney’s Prophet-5 synthesizer- led atrocity”, yet it’s precisely that delayed synth effect that makes me feel both festive and vulnerable to weepiness as I think of the baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in the manger. Even the lazy lyrics (these seem to be a theme of good-bad Christmas songs) don’t bother me. Take this Pulitzer Prize winner: “The choir of children sing their song / They practised all year long / Ding dong ding dong ding dong.” As one “hater” on Reddit points out: “Like ‘all year’, like have they been practising since January??? And THIS is all they come up with??? DING DONG???” To which I say: “where is your Christmas spirit, Ebenezer Scrooge?”

Happily, a pleasing number of people pop up in defence of these songs, too. “Just leave Paul alone to have a wonderful Christmastime with his new synth,” says one joker. Other posts come closer to pinpointing the wistful poignancy that “cheap” Christmas songs can induce. “It reminds me of being a kid at Christmas. My dad was a BIG Beatles fan… Sir Paul could do no wrong in my house. I am a grown man now and it takes me right back.” Another says his father has “been gone more than 30 years now but hearing this song always brings my dad to mind and helps make him a small part of my holidays. I’ll always love it.”

Suddenly I am a small child again in a shopping centre in the 1980s, holding my mum’s hand while these songs play on a loop. She’s dressed like Linda McCartney (who also died young, of breast cancer), with her sheepskin jacket, long knitted scarf and choppy fringe and I feel safe and cosy and giddy with excitement. “Last Christmas” by Wham! will do it, so too will Chris Rea and, I’m afraid, even Wizzard. It’s because those first few bars spark a good old, self-indulgent nostalgiafest – literally nostos (heroic return) and algos (pain) from the Greek. Noël Coward knew what he was talking about.

Of course, many of the cheaper Christmas songs don’t do it for me at all – more Proustian dog biscuit than madeleine. Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” and John & Yoko’s “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” might be controversial. I’d wager that Ronan Keating’s cover of “Fairytale of New York” definitely won’t be. And one of the most cringey Christmas moments comes courtesy of “Heroes”-era David Bowie singing “Little Drummer Boy” with old-timer Bing Crosby on his Christmas TV special of 1977.

When I started thinking about this column, I had a killer pay-off line: “And may all your Christmases be trite.” But I’ve rather written myself out of that. In fact, I’m going to return to the words of Slade (not something you’re likely to hear in your priest’s homily at the first Mass of Christmas): “Look to the future now, it’s only just begun.” Which, I’d argue, is actually quite profound. The glorious mystery of Christmas begins again (and again and again and again, should you work in retail), and now I am a piteously sentimental weeping mess. Pass me the tin of Roses – and “Merry Xmas Everybody”.

The post Trite Christmas: back to the future with the corny playlists of our youth first appeared on Catholic Herald.

The post Trite Christmas: back to the future with the corny playlists of our youth appeared first on Catholic Herald.