If you listen to YouTube holiday playlists or FM radio during Christmas time, you’ll surely notice that most of the songs are old. Not centuries old, like the best church hymns, but old enough that your WWII-veteran grandfather probably heard them as a young man. And aside from mediocre covers of the midcentury classics, there’s not much else.
In fact, American Christmas and holiday music is virtually frozen in time. Not since Mariah Carey belted out “All I Want for Christmas is You” in 1994 has a newly-written Christmas song entered the popular playlist (1984’s “Last Christmas” by supergroup Wham! found modern success—and endless radio play—and first landed on the Billboard charts in 2016). Aside from those, in more than a quarter-century, our nation of more than 300 million has not crafted a single worthwhile song for what is arguably our most important holiday and cultural celebration. The vast majority of popular Christmas songs date from about 1940 to 1994; but very few were written in the 1970s or 1980s. Most are clustered during the big band/jazz and Golden Hollywood period between the 1940s and the 1960s.
Spiritual and cultural bankruptcy might explain the dearth of new tunes. A less apocalyptic angle is that the stubborn endurance of midcentury Christmas music is one more facet of the trend towards “retro” and “vintage” and “analog.” After all, 1950s housing fixtures command big money for people restoring their tract homes to the original Levittown style, and one of the hottest gifts this time of the year is a portable phonograph or a stereo turntable. Next thing you know, Gene Autry’s scratched-up Rudolph album from the thrift store will be commanding top dollar.
Yet there is even another aspect to the “freezing” of holiday-related cultural production. A society that sings is a society that is happy. Perhaps we aren’t writing cheerful holiday ditties these days because we are not happy.