My Christmas Confession
OK, I admit it: I love to listen to Christmas songs this time of year.
I’ll leave it to you to determine if that makes me a bad Jew or a worse rabbi, but what can I say? I’ve got a major weakness for the ol’ seasonal standards.
Now I’m not talking about Christmas carols or overtly religious hymns (nor do I mean X-mas novelty kitsch like “Barking Dog Jingle Bells” or “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer.”) No, I’m really, truly a sucker for those aching, melancholy Christmas ballads.
I’m sure you know the ones – they actually come in various sub-genres. There are the “It’s Christmas and I’m Sad Because We’ve Broken Up” songs (i.e. “Christmas/Baby Please Come Home” or “All I Want For Christmas Is You.”) Then there are the “It’s Christmas and I’m Not Able To Make it Home” songs (i.e. “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” or “White Christmas”) and there’s the “This May Be the Last Christmas We Ever Spend Together” songs (i.e. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”)
Is it perverse or at all sacreligious for a rabbi to be confessing his love for songs such as these? I dunno, don’t you think there’s something of a Jewish quality to them? Maybe it’s their quasi-exilic yearning (not to mention the fact that most of them were written by Jews anyhow.)
So that’s my seasonal guilty pleasure confession. And lest you judge me too quickly here, just take the test yourself. Check out James Taylor’s version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” or “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” as sung by Sarah McLachlan. (Man, that last line gets me every time…)
“NY Fairytale”, by The Pogues. Do not fight me on this. This is the best Christmas song ever.
You are entitled to your own opinion about which is the second best Christmas song.
How could I leave out a song that begins “It was Christmas Eve in the drunk tank?” Of course, thanks for adding that one, DK
Allow me to add a bit of the Old Santafreud here. The CD ” Bummed Out Christmas” is one of my favorites (and a Jewish fan of novelty I am. Who can resist ” Christmas In Jail”? Or George Jones ” Lonely Christmas Call”. Weep in your Latkes good. 🙂
(oh, and BTW, you are neither bad or good…just a connoisseur of music)
I share your guilty pleasure, Shalom Rav. 🙂 I second the Pogues nomination…
What’s the Jewish quality about them? Most of them were probably written by Jews!
NVM, you pointed that out. Still, my preference is Christmas tunes written and performed by Black people.
Listen, I really like Indian hip-hop music, and I’m probably the whitest little Caucasian girl you ever did meet… so why can’t a rabbi like some sappy Christmas music? No matter the “reason for the season” (i.e. Jesus, who is not my reason for, well, much, if anything), Christmas music has that emotional, achy, introspective feel. Who doens’t love that every now & again? You can borrow my N’Sync Christmas album, if you want…
The “Jewish quality” in pop music from the first half of the 20th century isn’t as simple as “they were written by Jews.” After all, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” was written by a 7th Day Adventist (Hugh Martin), but it sounds just as “Jewish” as “White Christmas,” written by MOT Irving Berlin.
The musical vocabulary of Tin Pan Alley borrowed heavily fromthe cantorial music of Eastern Europe because many of the most popular songwriters inherited that tradition. (Some, like Harold Arlen, inherited it directly – his father was a cantor, and once Arlen became famous, his father was known to incorporate Arlen’s hit songs into Shabbat services, melding the words of kaddish with the melody of “Stormy Weather,” etc.)
There were non-Jewish composers who found success in Tin Pan Alley, on Broadway, and in Hollywood – the abovementioned Hugh Martin being one, Cole Porter being perhaps the most famous. But Porter also famously attributed his success to his ability to write “Jewish tunes.”
I’m not enough of a musician or a musicologist to write in much greater detail about how exactly American pop music relied on cantorial modes… I could mutter something about minor keys and 7th chords, but if anyone’s interested, I’m sure there are many more capable people than I who can jump in here (or suggest other reading).
There were non-Jewish composers who found success in Tin Pan Alley, on Broadway, and in Hollywood – the abovementioned Hugh Martin being one, Cole Porter being perhaps the most famous. But Porter also famously attributed his success to his ability to write “Jewish tunes.”
Ha. I heard Ehud Manor z”l speak about how he got started writing songs, and he said that when he was a kid in Israel, the music he listened to was Irving Berlin, George & Ira Gershwin, and Cole Porter, and then he learned that Irving Berlin was Israel Baline, and Gershwin was Gershowitz, but Cole Porter was Cole Porter.
Yup. Does it make you feel any better to know that the movie that “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” came from, “Meet Me in St. Louis” was written by a yid named Irving Brecher? He talks about in his new book, Wicked Wit of the West.