By Rick

The holiday season creates the ultimate nostalgia. Familiar decorations spring up practically overnight after the Thanksgiving weekend. Lights show up on houses throughout the neighborhood. In New York, the tree goes up at Rockafeller center and the Bryant Park ice skating rink opens up. Sometimes, if we’re lucky here in the North, we’ll have the first snow sometime during the eight days of Hanukkah, or even a white Christmas. But for me, nothing opens the holiday flood gates wider than the first holiday song. Also, for me, it means pulling the holiday repertoire out of my mental stores, in preparation for a multitude of piano requests. 

For the music business, I think the holidays hold a special place. I always remember the Nick Hornsby book and movie “About A Boy”, where Will, Hugh Grant’s character, lives off the money generated by the fictional Christmas song “Santa’s Super Sleigh”. This movie probably marked the first time I ever gave thought to licensing and royalties. What was even more jarring for me was the story my father told me about growing up in Greenwitch Village. He was friends with a man named David Marks, whose father Johnny Marks wrote the holiday favorite “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”. Johnny Marks was exactly like Will from “About A Boy”, he lived in his brownstone, quietly, and always in a bathrobe- or so says my father. 

Where did this commercialization of the holidays come from? Songs in the standard repertoire are often recycled, even in today’s pop market, but none are more aggressively recycled than holiday songs. Everything from “Rudolph” to Adam Sandler’s “Hanukkah Song” go through different versions and are played reliably over and over again, year after year. For example, “The Christmas Song”, written by Mel Torme, but made popular by Nat Cole, has spawned more covers than I care to note. Some radio stations, after a certain date, play ONLY holiday songs. 

I’m not trying to say that the “commercialization” of holiday music is a bad thing, merely that it happened, and the musical holiday output has been based around it. Music has always been an arm of celebration, it’s just that the tone of this celebration has changed through the years. Surely, early holiday music had much more to do with the “holy” than with the “money”. For example, the hanukkah song “Ma’oz Tzur”, written in the 13th century, is a song about the temple in Jerusalem and God as the “Rock of Ages”, a far cry from Adam Sandler. Likewise, songs like “O Holy Night” and many other like songs were directly about the birth of Jesus, and were written to spread the story of Christmas. What has happened is the replacement of the religious need for God by the secular need for holiday music without God. 

I think what it really is, is what I touched on before. What people really yearn for during the holiday season is the need for nostalgia. When I hear that first holiday song, it reminds of family, of previous holidays, of home, of happiness, of getting presents as a kid, of the past. Surely, this experience is different for different people. Of course, these are just my thoughts on the state of the holidays, and I hope you out there in Indabaland will comment below on what the holidays and holiday music mean to you.