{"id":1214033,"date":"2023-12-21T14:30:58","date_gmt":"2023-12-21T19:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1214033"},"modified":"2023-12-21T14:30:58","modified_gmt":"2023-12-21T19:30:58","slug":"eight-popular-christmas-songs-that-arent-actually-christmas-songs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1214033","title":{"rendered":"Eight Popular \u2018Christmas Songs\u2019 That Aren\u2019t Actually Christmas Songs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every year the holiday season seems to get longer. By the time Christmas actually arrives, you\u2019ve heard more than your fair share of Christmas music\u2014it\u2019s practically inescapable. And every holiday playlist looks nearly the same as the next; if you search for \u201cChristmas music\u201d on any platform you\u2019ll get similar results\u2014including a bunch of songs that have become closely associated with the holiday but aren\u2019t actually<\/em> Christmas songs except by association.<\/p>\n

Sometimes these non-Christmas Christmas songs make sense, because their lyrical imagery is all wintry and it\u2019s easy to see the holidays implied within them. But if you pause for a moment to really think about those lyrics, it\u2019s usually pretty obvious what is and isn\u2019t<\/em> an actual, bona-fide<\/em> Christmas song. Here are eleven that snuck into the holiday season under false pretenses.<\/p>\n

\u201cWinter Wonderland\u201d<\/h2>\n
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A constant on holiday playlists, \u201cWinter Wonderland\u201d started life as a poem composed by Richard Bernhard Smith<\/a> as he recovered from a bout of tuberculosis in 1934. Isolated in a sanitarium due to his very contagious disease, Smith passed the time entering contests writing commercial jingles for companies. Waking up to a fresh snowfall one day, he wrote the words that would become this holiday classic. Music was composed<\/a> for it that same year, and it became an instant hit\u2014but there\u2019s zero mention of Christmas in there, and the song was never really intended as a holiday song at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cJingle Bells\u201d<\/h2>\n
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Composed in 1857 by James Pierpont, \u201cJingle Bells\u201d was originally called \u201cOne Horse Open Sleigh.\u201d It is<\/em> technically a holiday song\u2014it was originally intended to be a Thanksgiving-themed tune<\/a>. The full song is actually kind of mischievous, telling a tale of young men racing their sleighs, trying to pick up girls, and getting into a violent crash. It\u2019s essentially a call to sow those wild oats while you can, so it\u2019s kind of remarkable that it\u2019s become a Christmas classic.<\/p>\n

\u201cJingle Bell Rock\u201d<\/h2>\n
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Written by a pair of middle-aged executives and recorded by an up-and-coming country music star named Bobby Helms, \u201cJingle Bell Rock\u201d doesn\u2019t just lack any sort of literal Christmas spirit\u2014it purposefully<\/em> lacks it. According to the Los Angeles Times<\/a>, Helms came from a pretty religious background, and knew his mother wouldn\u2019t approve of mixing religion with rock n\u2019 roll (this was 1957, when rock music was still considered a dangerous trend<\/a> corrupting the youth of America). So he made certain the lyrics were completely religion-free.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!\u201d<\/h2>\n

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Written by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne in 1945, \u201cLet It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!\u201d (yes, the official title has the phrase repeated three times) was inspired by the very opposite of Christmastime: a heat wave<\/a>. Sweltering in the California heat in the age before air conditioning was commonly available, the songwriters conjured up an image of a cold, snowy morning to cool their overheated nerves, and a holiday classic that never once mentions Christmas<\/a> was born.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrosty The Snowman\u201d<\/h2>\n
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Perhaps the most irritating Christmas song of all time is associated with the holiday in large part due to the beloved 1969 television special built around the song, in which a snowman comes to life via magical hat and terrorizes a neighborhood. But the song itself was conceived as a more generic winter season song<\/a>, written specifically for Gene Autry in 1950 as a follow-up to his smash hit \u201cRudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.\u201d When the TV special was conceived, the plot of the song was expanded and the Christmas stuff was shoehorned in, including an altered final lyric that changed \u201cback again some day\u201d to \u201cback on Christmas Day.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLinus And Lucy\u201d By The Vince Guaraldi Trio<\/h2>\n
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Originally composed to be on the soundtrack of a documentary<\/a>, the song that became the jazz standard (and unofficial theme song of the Peanuts<\/em> cartoons) has no lyrical content at all. The only reason we associate it with Christmas is its debut as part of the soundtrack for A Charlie Brown Christmas<\/em> in 1965. Even though the song appeared in all the subsequent Charlie Brown specials and doesn\u2019t even feature bells or other holiday-esque touches, it\u2019s considered a Christmas song as a result.<\/p>\n

\u201cSleigh Ride\u201d<\/h2>\n
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\u201cSleigh Ride\u201d is another Christmas classic that is both inspired by a heat wave and has nothing to do with Christmas<\/a>. Composer Leroy Anderson was cooped up in a hot cottage in Connecticut during a hot 1946 summer, and wrote \u201cSleigh Ride\u201d while wishing for cooler weather. He describes it as \u201cjust another piece of music that I wrote.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy Favorite Things\u201d<\/h2>\n
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This classic song is now known primarily thanks to Julie Andrews and The Sound of Music<\/em>, but it made its public debut in 1959 as part of the Broadway production of the story. It was not originally intended as a holiday-themed song, but when the film was poised to be released in 1965, producers worried that they didn\u2019t have a hit song driving ticket sales, so they approached singer Jack Jones about recording one of the songs in hopes of landing on the charts. Jones was making a Christmas album, and liked \u201cMy Favorite Things,\u201d but worried that it wasn\u2019t really a Christmas song. The solution? \u201cJust add sleigh bells<\/a>.\u201d It worked.<\/p>\n


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\nSource: LifeHacker – Eight Popular \u2018Christmas Songs\u2019 That Aren\u2019t Actually Christmas Songs<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every year the holiday season seems to get longer. By the time Christmas actually arrives, you\u2019ve heard more than your fair share of Christmas music\u2014it\u2019s practically inescapable. And every holiday playlist looks nearly the same as the next; if you … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[91,110],"tags":[92],"class_list":["post-1214033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lifehacker","category-unfiltered-rss","tag-lifehacker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1214033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1214033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1214033\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1214033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1214033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1214033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}