I love Christmas music.
I'm mentioning this as early as possible so you don't think I'm coming at this from a place of cynicism or weariness over the state of this particular genre. I love liturgical Christmas music, popular Christmas music, novelty Christmas music, all of it. I have it on the radio all December long, and I've got a constantly growing playlist to share with family and friends. I love Christmas music.
That said, there's one popular holiday song that I hear multiple times each and every year which is slowly but surely driving me insane.
Again, pausing here to make an important distinction: This is not to say I hate this song. If I hate a song, I just don't listen to it; it's very uncomplicated. No, this is a feeling that lies somewhere between Stockholm Syndrome, anthropological curiosity, and good old-fashioned testing of my personal limits. Whenever I hear the song start I have to sit and experience the whole thing, to see what it'll do to me this time, as though if I reach a certain threshold of audio absorption I'll start to grow extra limbs and log them like I'm Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.
This is the song. You've probably heard it. Everyone in the Christmas celebrating world has at one point or another.
Yes, this is one of Christmas crooner Andy Williams's signature songs (the other being "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year") and it's a staple of Christmas radio airplay and department story playlists in December. It's a fascinating piece of music, in part because it's actually two songs. "Happy Holiday," whose refrain kicks off the recording – originally released on 1963's The Andy Williams Christmas Album – was written by Irving Berlin, and dates back to a Bing Crosby recording in 1942 for the film Holiday Inn (also the first movie to feature "White Christmas"). The other portion of the song, "The Holiday Season," was written by Williams' friend, mentor, and sometime lover, Kay Thompson, an actress and singer who also created the popular Eloise children's books. When Williams was recording his first Christmas album, which also included Thompson's arrangement of "Jingle Bells," she dusted off her song, originally written in the 1940s, hybridized it with Berlin's, and passed it along to Williams.
So if it sounds like you're hearing two songs weirdly spliced together, that's because you are, but I'm not really here to talk about the Irving Berlin portion of the composition. Thompson was an accomplished writer in and out of the music world, but "The Holiday Season" feels like…well, you know that feeling when you're watching a Christmas special or listening to the radio during December, and a song comes on that was clearly just dashed off in a hurry to fill a slot in the program or add an extra royalty-earning track to the record? There are hundreds, maybe thousands of these largely forgettable songs, and they play like first drafts, like the writer always thought they'd come back with something better, and just never quite got around to it.
At first blush, "The Holiday Season" is like that, but the closer you look at it, the more it feels like a carefully calculated and calibrated Christmas song plan, which makes it even more baffling.
In content, it's very much in the same vein as something like "Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town" or "Here Comes Santa Claus," right? He's on his way, he's got presents, make sure to leave him some treats and hang up your stocking, kids! The production is cheerful, Williams' voice is smooth and buoyant as always, but the more I listen to the lyrics, the more I start to feel like I got a bad dose of something, and it starts with the refrain which comes at the end of each verse.
"He'll be comin' down the chimney, down
(He'll be comin' down the chimney, down)"
Williams sings this line, and then his choir repeats it. This happens, with slight variations, four times over the course of a 158-second song. The first time it happens, it's there to continue a rhyme scheme that began with "Santa Claus is comin' 'round." The rhyme scheme continues with "ground" and "town," so naturally the verse ends with "down."
This is not how anyone talks.
Since the days of Clement Clark Moore we have been talking about Santa coming down chimneys. He does it in the stories we tell our kids, in TV shows, in films, in books, in other songs. Santa comes down the chimney! It's such a piece of the cultural lexicon around the Christmas holiday that absolutely everyone knows this. Now, I'm not an idiot. I understand that Thompson and Williams put that extra "down" in there to create a rhyme, but when it becomes a refrain like that, including in verses that don't rhyme with "down," it starts to do something to my brain. I start to think of Santa coming down the chimney and then just…going down, down, down again. It feels like Santa descending into Hell. Is he going down there to melt the devil's cold heart with a present? Was he a demon this whole time? I don't know and Andy Williams is not around to ask!
But that's not the line that really gets me. No, that honor goes to the song's third verse, when, for reasons unknown to us and possibly even to the most daring of eldritch Yuletide scholars, we get this:
"It's the holiday season.
So hoop-dee-doo and dickory dock
And don't forget to hang up your sock
'Cause just exactly at 12 o'clock
He'll be comin' down the chimney, down
(He'll be comin' down the chimney, down)"
The first line and the last two lines are there in every verse, so just take those out of the equation for a moment: How does one "hoop-dee-doo and dickory dock?" I ask because it's written like an instruction. We are meant to hoop-dee-doo and dickory dock and then we must remember to hang up a sock, because stocking doesn't rhyme there. Also do it all by midnight because that's "exactly" when Santa comes. How does that work with time zones? That's Santa magic, we're not talking about that here.
More than anything else in the song, this feels like something that was just sort of scribbled down because a third verse was needed. There might not actually be any conviction in it, but damn it, when Andy Williams is singing in front of a big band with a bunch of backup singers, it has conviction. This feels important, and yet it makes no sense in any context of Christmas I know or can fathom. These words feel like what you'd get if you untangled a series of random characters in English occultist John Dee's Enochian alphabet and then just arranged them into regular letters. Say them out loud, roll them around in your mouth like wine. They don't feel right!
And yet. And yet. I always have a good time when I hear this song, even though it sometimes feels like a drill is going in and out of my brain while it's happening. It doesn't make sense, and yet it makes perfect sense. It's pleasure and pain, order and chaos in equal measure.
And after all, isn't that what Christmas is all about?
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