Your Daily Dose of CHRISTMAS!!!

So, what makes a Christmas song a “Christmas Song”, anyway? Does the lyrical content have to be specifically relevant to Christmas? Obviously not, as many of the most accepted and beloved songs for this time of year don’t mention Christmas specifically at all (“Jingle Bells”, “Winter Wonderland”, and so on). But the ones that don’t mention Christmas do tend to be at least Christmas-adjacent, with their focus on wintry stuff…but even those can feel strange at times. When we were in Hawaii at Christmastime a few years ago, hearing “Winter Wonderland” in a tropical paradise really messed with our heads.

I saw a rant video online the other day, maybe it was on Tiktok, about “My Favorite Things” and how it is NOT NOT NOT  a Christmas song! Not only does it have nothing lyrically to do with Christmas, it’s not even a winter song (though it does mention a couple of wintry things in its roster of “favorite things”). How can it be a perennially-heard song this time of year then, with many cover versions? Is it just that it mentions wrapped packages “tied up with strings”? Can that be all?

Well…yes. Yes, it can. And the answer to “Why is it a Christmas song?” is clearly very simple: Someone decided early on that it was, and now it has many decades–over six of them now!–of momentum and tradition behind it. And what people who perform a lyrical dissection of “My Favorite Things” every year in hopes of finally proving beyond doubt that it is not a Christmas song completely miss is that human tradition often makes things into Things even though there’s nothing inherently Thingy about them, and that human tradition is formed more by repetition of emotion than by cold logic. Now, will more recent efforts to turn, say, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” into a Christmas song be likewise successful? I somewhat doubt it…but I don’t rule it out, either. Human tradition is strange and it does strange things. Who among us doesn’t have a specific family tradition that makes zero sense to people outside it?

Anyway, here’s “My Favorite Things”, because…it’s Christmas!

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