Playlist
* Colorado Christmas Greg Blake 3:25
* My Little Country Church at Christmas Time Matt Anderson 4:15
Introduction
I’ve noticed a pattern. In the rare times when new songs get into the rare status of having sufficient popular appeal that they come back year after year, it is usually not that they are about new aspects of the holiday, or express new feelings. To achieve the status of becoming a Christmas Classic they respect the traditional tropes of Christmas songs.
Those can be organized by topic, and within each topic the ones that have become and remained popular adhere to an optimistic or nostalgic take on the events or feelings they portray. All I Want for Christmas is You is a new “Christmas Classic” song, but it is not a new trope.
Calling the recurring themes of Christmas music “tropes” is not a criticism of them. I think that one of the things that most of us love about the holiday season is that its “meaning” is optimistic and aspirational. Our vision of the perfect Christmas is our vision for a perfect world. We sing about the world we want, not necessarily the real world around us. And we return to those same aspirations every year, especially at this season that is identified as a time of new beginnings and redemption.
An example of such a trope is that our songs about going home for Christmas are almost always about leaving the city and returning to rural roots. That also seems to be the common scenario for Hallmark Christmas movies.
We live in a time when most people have grown up in cities or the suburbs, but there are very few “Christmas Classic” songs about going there for Christmas. (Silver Bells is the exception, and interestingly that song is much more likely commonly recorded by country music singers.) The popular Christmas songs are almost always about returning to home in the country or a small town. I suppose that it is difficult to convey sentimentality and nostalgia for urban life, and those are emotions that we have come to want and expect from our annual binge of Christmas.
The core trope of such songs seems to be that the key to achieving a better future can be found by returning to Christmas’ idealized past.
Music notes
Colorado Christmas This song has someone expressing a desire to experience snow on Christmas Day. Where have we heard that before?
It was written by the late singer/songwriter Steve Goodman (1948-’84). Goodman is best known for having written City of New Orleans. He was born and lived most of his life in Chicago, but he and his family lived in Seal Beach near Los Angeles from 1980 to ’84, near the end of his tragically short life. Goodman never lived in Colorado. But the song’s references to wanting to go there are not expressing a longing to return home – just to experience the snow there, as is the case with that other song. Here is Goodman’s own recording of this song, released posthumously.
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band had recorded Colorado Christmas in 1983, the same year it was written, and released it as the “A” side of a 45rpm 7” record (with a re-release of their early big hit Mister Bojangles on the “B” side.) I was going to include their version of the song here, but then I found this one by Greg Blake on YouTube. I love its intimacy - just him and his guitar. It isn’t from a recording: You can see him playing and singing it in the video, and in an introduction he says that it was the third song that he posted on that day. Greg has a website where you can learn more about him and his music.
Looking out the window of this Hollywood hotelYou’d never know that it was Christmas Eve.The billboards and the neon took the place of silver bells,And the temperature is 84 degrees.
I can hear the traffic on the crowded strip below,As the palm trees poke their heads above the scene.There’s not a single reindeer and it hardly ever snows,And Santa drives a Rolls Royce limousine. But all along the Rockies you can feel it in the air From Telluride to Boulder down below, The closest thing to heaven on this planet anywhere Is a quiet Christmas morning in the Colorado snow.I remember Christmases when I was just a boy,In the morning I would run to see the tree.And the carolers on the hillside sang their songs of Christmas joy,Well, I always thought they sang them just for me.
Now the sun is setting in the California skyAnd I can’t find the spirit anywhere.So I think it’s time for me to tell Los Angeles goodbyeI’m going back home to look for Christmas there. But all along the Rockies you can feel it in the air From Telluride to Boulder down below, The closest thing to heaven on this planet anywhere Is a quiet Christmas morning in the Colorado snow.
By the way, this song is very similar in both sentiment and content of the little-known introductory verse that Irving Berlin wrote for his immortal White Christmas. That verse was not included in Bing Crosby’s version which became such a big hit song that it became the template for almost every cover of it, so they do not include the introductory verse either. But that verse provides a clarifying set-up for why the narrator has such a longing for snow on Christmas:
The sun is shining, the grass is greenThe orange and palm trees swayThere’s never been such a dayIn Beverly Hills, L.ABut it’s December the twenty-fourthAnd I am longing to be up North.I’m dreaming of a white ChristmasJust like the ones I used to know....
You can hear that introduction in this beautiful rendition of White Christmas sung by Ginny Reilly, recorded in 1984.
My Little Country Church at Christmas Time This song is by singer-songwriter Matt Andersen and is from his self-published 2011 album Spirit of Christmas. Attending church on Christmas is a common country music Christmas-song trope. I’m not really into country music myself in general, but that kind of music is a great source for Christmas songs that exhibit sincerity and authenticity, and that is what I hear in this song. I especially like the little touches, like noting “the crack of the pews as we kneel down” and “the sound of the heater clicking on.” I presume that this song comes from personal experience, either depicting one particular Christmas service or memories compiled from several of them.
Matt was raised in the small village of Perth-Andover, New Brunswick but now lives in the Ottawa Valley. The first line of the song suggests that the song is from the perspective of someone who lives in the community, rather than someone who has returned home for the holidays, and narrator’s parents are clearly depicted as being members of the congregation. That leads me to suspect that Matt Andersen wrote this song based on childhood memories of going to church on Christmas.
Seeing faces, we haven’t seen all yearAnd some who’ve come as friends of friendsOur hearts are filled with Christmas cheerAnd the chills we get, when the songs begin
I hear my mother singing with the choirMy father shaking hands at the doorIt’s the smell of the hall hung with freshly cut pineIt’s my little country church at Christmas time
The crack of the pews as we kneel downThe sound of the heater clicking onA fresh batch of snow lays on the groundAs we think about the year that’s come and gone
I hear my mother singing with the choirMy father shaking hands at the doorIt’s the smell of the hall hung with freshly cut pineIt’s my little country church at Christmas time
A father holds his daughterA mother holds her sonWe bow our heads and we are thankfulFor all that we have, to be among the lucky ones
The room is full with the love of ChristmasWe share a smile as a baby criesWe sound just like a band of angelsAs we sing the closing hymn of Silent Night
I hear my mother singing with the choirMy father shaking hands at the doorIt’s the smell of the hall hung with freshly cut pineIt’s my little country church at Christmas time
