December 17, 2024 | 12:00am
A soldier in the battlefield longing to be home for Christmas inspired the great composer Irving Berlin to write White Christmas in 1942. Thus, was born the first secular Christmas song which has now sold over 50 million copies. Before this, Christmas songs were sacred, church-sourced and traditional, dating back to centuries ago. White Christmas changed all that.
More than 80 years later, creating Christmas music has become a huge business and one of the biggest earners of all time is All I Want for Christmas, a composition by singer Mariah Carey and record producer Walter Afanasieff. It is not traditional or church sourced. It is a secular Christmas song and more than all that, it is a love song.
The success of White Christmas spawned more secular Christmas songs. Among those were Here Comes Santa Claus, Santa Claus is Coming to Town and I’ll Be Home for Christmas, which was also inspired by soldiers wanting to be home for Christmas.
These were also all recorded by Bing Crosby and became very popular.
A short while later there came You’re All I Want for Christmas. Remember “…then I’ll awake on Christmas morning and find my stockings filled with you.?”
Composed by two jazz musicians, Walter Kent and Ken Gannon in 1943, it was the first tune to associate Christmas with romantic love.
Now as any songwriter will tell you, love songs are the easiest to write and they are almost always in the throes, broken-hearted or joyously ecstatic in love. So, You’re All I Want for Christmas was followed by a watershed of Christmas love songs of every sort.
These turned out to be happy, I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm and Winter Wonderland, sad, Christmas Baby Please Come Home and Santa Bring My Baby Back to Me, broken-hearted, Blue Christmas and Last Christmas, seductive Give Me Your Heart for Christmas and Baby It’s Cold Outside, even gold-digging, Santa Baby, and of course, wishful, All I Want for Christmas is You, which I must say harks back to that first romantic Christmas song long, long ago.
Hereabouts, Christmas songs are either the villancico-inspired like Ang Pasko ay Sumapit, or western influenced like Payapang Daigdig after Silent Night or the romantic love song, which emotional Filipinos absolutely adore, Christmas Won’t be the Same without You, Pasko Na Sinta Ko, Miss Kita Kung Christmas, Sana Ngayong Pasko and others.
I have always believed that the message of Christmas transcends impermanent relationships, particularly romantic ones. Christmas is peace on earth and goodwill towards men. It goes beyond All I Want for Christmas is You and it should be in a Give Love on Christmas Day mode for all time. But somehow romantic sentiments centered on one person are always more popular. Happily, though, there can be exceptions.
This question came to fore when Jose Mari Chan recorded a Christmas album in 1990. Which would make a better single, the love song A Perfect Christmas or the non-romantic but so filled with the true Christmas message Christmas in our Hearts.
A Perfect Christmas was similar to Chan’s big hits, Beautiful Girl, Refrain, Can We Just Stop and Talk a While, sweetly romantic in his usual style. Christmas in our Hearts though was no love song and it was a duet with an unknown singer with no chart record, Chan’s daughter Lisa. It must have been an eeny, meeny, miney mo……decision.
Anyway, Christmas in our Hearts won the contest and went on to unprecedented greatness. To be fair, A Perfect Christmas did not do so bad either. Released on singles only a month later, it has since become one of the most enduring Christmas love songs.
Still, sometimes I wonder, if A Perfect Christmas was released first, would the love-obsessed Pinoy have loved Christmas in our Hearts just as much?
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