One thing I love most about the holidays is listening to Christmas music. No matter how stressed out I get about deadlines this time of year, music never fails to remind me the meaning of the season and how much I enjoyed Christmas as a kid.
However, I notice there's an issue with A LOT of the songs you hear every year. Mainly, they're mostly inappropriate for Christmas Day.
This was something I first noticed on Christmas Day 1987. For whatever reason, the TV was on CMT and featured a performance by Crystal Gayle singing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." I was aware that it was a performance that had been recorded prior to Christmas Day, but the thought occurred to me that it didn't make any sense to be singing this particular song today. After all, "Santa" came last night, so why are we singing about it today?
And then I realized that the vast majority of Christmas songs would not match this criteria for timeliness on Christmas Day. They basically lead up to a big climax on Christmas Eve. This includes the songs about Jesus and Santa. "O Holy Night?" Well, It's daytime now. What are we supposed to do? Wait around for Mary to breastfeed him? "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town?" Well, he came and went last night. Now, we have all these presents we don't know what to do with.
This is compounded by the fact we don't know what time Christ was born. (And really, we don't know what day.) But we seem to have this idea that he was born after midnight, so that's what we roll with. Just know that a lot of songwriters seem to find more inspiration from everything that takes place in the wee hours and not so much on December 25th, after everyone's done with their long winter's nap.
So what does this leave us with? Years ago, I had a blog post of "Fayd's Favorite Songs of the Season." The theme was that all the songs listed made no mention of Christmas, Jesus or Santa. All these songs would be appropriate.
I'm not going to supply an exhaustive list of songs appropriate for Christmas Day, but I will go with a few to give you an idea. Just know I can't think of many religious songs that would meet this criteria. Only "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" comes to mind.
Other non-religious songs include: "Deck the Halls"
"We Wish You a Merry Christmas"
"Feliz Navidad"
"Last Christmas"
"All I Want for Christmas is You"
"Do They Know It's Christmas"
Any songs about coming home for Christmas, like "2000 Miles" and "Please Come Home for Christmas." After all, if people make it home the day of Christmas, it still counts.
And there are actually a couple of songs about Santa that would be appropriate. "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" and "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" both reference events that took place the night before and are being relayed on Christmas Day.
Also, all the music from "The Nutcracker" would work, because that takes place on Christmas Day.
Wow, this is a really short list. I hope some songwriters are out there working on new material.