The Great American Christmas-Album Tradition

W ho would imagine that the Beach Boys, the Jackson 5, and the Carpenters would have much in common? Apart from being midcentury American musical acts, they represent such a mix of musical styles — from Southern California–inflected rock to Motown-derived pop to too-mellow-for-words easy listening — that comparisons seem pointless.

Yet, from time to time in their careers, the groups’ differences melted away — not unlike, say, fresh snow on pavement. Each contributed to a musical genre at once steeped in tradition — and therefore relatively inflexible in its rules and norms — and surprisingly open to all comers: the Christmas album.

Indeed, it is a sign of how accommodating the genre is that it can encompass the wide variety of sounds heard on The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album (1964), the Jackson 5 Christmas Album (1970), and the Carpenters’ Christmas Portrait (1978). But the genre’s adaptability is on full view nearly every holiday season. This year alone, artists and acts as dissimilar as Idina Menzel, the Oak Ridge Boys, and ex–Saturday Night Live star Ana Gasteyer have offered up Christmas albums. What accounts for the resilience of the genre? And why do we keep coming back to artists who sing about chilly weather and Santa Claus?

After all, if there was ever a musical genre that would seem likely to have played itself out by 2019, it would be this one. According to The Routledge Guide to Music Technology (2006), Christmas records date back as far as 1899, when banjo player Will Lyle’s performance of “Jingle Bells” was released. In the years that followed, classic carols dominated holiday records, including tenor Enrico Caruso’s version of “O Holy Night” and soprano Elisabeth Schumann’s “Silent Night.”

Such relatively stodgy offerings did not foretell the co-opting of the genre by popular artists, including singer, actor, and perpetual co-star of Bob Hope, Bing Crosby. In 1945, the commercial triumph of Crosby’s Decca album Merry Christmas — consisting of Crosby tracks that had already been disseminated to the public, including “White Christmas” — was a game-changer. “Merry Christmas counts for more than sales,” wrote Gary Giddins in his indispensable 2018 biography Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star — The War Years, 1940–1946. “It set the table for the thematic compilations that flourished in the age of vinyl and launched an international tradition, flinging a compulsory challenge to generations of performers to enter the seasonal sweepstakes.”

Less easily imitated, though, was the innocent sincerity of Crosby’s performances—a key part of his, and his successors’, ongoing appeal. In his version of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” also included in the 1945 Merry Christmas album, Crosby adopted a slow, soothing tempo — for example, elongating his enunciation of the word “Eve” in the line “Christmas Eve will find me” — that suggests a homesickness that can’t be easily quelled. The distance between this mournful tune and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” — performed by Crosby with such good-natured jauntiness that it brings to mind an image of him with a half-grin on his face — is a sign of the expansiveness of the genre.

Perhaps the Christmas album, then, has remained a fixture on the American music scene because it can embody the contradictions of Christmas itself. Other holidays give rise to more uncomplicated emotions — say, the patriotism of the Fourth of July or the contented feasting of Thanksgiving. By contrast, Christmas can provoke a strange brew of emotions; it’s capable of inciting high spirits one minute and a sense of loneliness or loss the next. The best Christmas albums, like Crosby’s Merry Christmas, are made up of songs that illustrate both the frivolity and the melancholy, helping us enunciate the swirl of inner thoughts we have this time of year.

Indeed, Crosby’s seeming commitment to the sentiments in his songs was modeled by the artists who caught the Christmas-album bug in his wake. In the album A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra (1957), the crooner found new ways to express the forward-looking longing at the heart of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” a song that had its debut courtesy of Judy Garland in the 1944 film musical Meet Me in St. Louis. The mandate to look to happier Christmases that might lie ahead was sung with a kind of girlish hopefulness by Garland, but — with the help of some revamped lyrics — it was given a fresh sheen of toughness and resoluteness by Sinatra. Coming from Ol’ Blue Eyes, the line “From now on, our troubles will be miles away” is an order, not a wish. The singer brought to mind an old pal or best buddy empathetically inclining his ear to the listener’s problems and doing his best to lift his spirits.

The following year, Johnny Mathis’s album Merry Christmas (1958) had its share of sad or sacred songs, but, with his upbeat renditions of “Sleigh Ride” and “Winter Wonderland,” it also evoked the atmosphere of a celebratory gathering. It was easy to imagine Mathis performing these tracks in a lodge or resort somewhere — an image obviously suggested by the album’s classic cover, which shows the singer posing on the slopes while toting a set of skis. Indeed, the artwork used on Christmas-album covers is an undeniable, if largely unacknowledged, part of their appeal. For example, the cozy cover of Jo Stafford’s album Happy Holiday (1955), with the title written in loopy cursive, shows the singer on a kind of yuletide picnic in the company of a young child in a snow suit, along with a snowman and a squirrel — a kitschy image, perhaps, but actual self-parody would not overwhelm the genre until the following decade.

For the cover of their 1964 Christmas album, the Beach Boys, donning sweaters along with their signature khakis, were photographed placing ornaments on a Christmas tree — an image that  might have been dreamt up by an illustrator at Mad magazine. By now, unexpected, tongue-in-cheek contrasts — who would expect these surfers to gather around the tree, garland in hand? — had become embedded in the form. The incongruity of, say, Bob Dylan or the Monkees making Christmas music was part of the fun. As for the music itself, the Beach Boys’ performance of “Frosty the Snowman” is a study in cognitive dissonance. Snowmen in Southern California? Come on. Indeed, the genre has long proven to be susceptible to jokiness, evidenced by the existence of Christmas albums attributed to Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Too often, contemporary Christmas albums have the atmosphere of artists playing dress-up — look, there are M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel gussied up in their Christmas finery on the cover of A Very She & Him Christmas. Their performances can have too much wink-winking and not enough Crosby-Sinatra-Mathis earnestness. And when the musical flavor of the month — like New Kids on the Block in the 1980s, Hanson in the 1990s, and assorted American Idol contestants in the new millennium — record albums in the genre, the results aren’t necessarily any more interesting than the stuff they churn out at other times of the year.

At the same time, the persistence of the Christmas album — even when it is being adapted, revised, mangled, or subtly sent up — suggests that our culture may not be as divided as the pundits and politicos claim. The fact that artists from every musical background feel the tug of the holidays — and that listeners want those artists’ soundtracks to accompany their shopping excursions, family get-togethers, and holiday-meal prep work — is itself a cause to celebrate.