a sad song's best for winter

melancholy holiday music

Christmas, the secular holiday, is nostalgic. As a religious holiday, Christmas looks forward, but as a secular holiday, it looks backward. Every Christmas contains Christmases past, particularly if you come from a pack rat family, which I do.¹ You look at things and you know that you got them at this or that time, that you were feeling this or that way, that this or that particular bespoke family tradition started with this or that family member. You remember that every year you intend to do something you never do, the not doing of which is almost its own tradition. There are other things in life to feel this way about other than Christmas, but Christmas has its codified smells, sounds, movies, and colors. It is also everywhere. Even if you do not yourself observe or even like Christmas you are nonetheless subject to its sense of circularity, of adding the newest layer to the two thousand year matryoshka doll. It might happen against your will, but it will happen.

So outside of religious music, the great Christmas songs can be a little sad, because they’re usually stuck in the past. You’ll be home for Christmas, but only in your dreams. Last Christmas, you gave somebody your heart, and they threw it away. It’s coming on Christmas and they’re cutting down trees and it doesn’t even snow here. Have yourself a merry little Christmas; it might be your last. My baby’s gone and I have no friends. You’ll be doin’ all right with your Christmas of white, but I’ll have a blue Christmas ’Tis the damn season, you might say.²

Overplayed, this Yuletide melancholy can become as grating as spray-on Yuletide cheer; given a choice between the thin, cheerless children’s choir of Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time Is Here” and an off-key children’s choir doing “Jingle Bells,” I will go for “Jingle Bells” without hesitation.

All of the above is preamble to my current favorite sad Christmas song, the Bleachers song “Merry Christmas, Please Don’t Call.” In an interview about this song, Jack Antonoff³ said that he was thinking about the image of somebody staring through a window at Christmas. It’s cold outside, nice inside. And this song is from the perspective of the person inside. It’s about why the other person is stuck out there, which is that the other person, the song’s “golden boy,” was cruel (“you were mine, but you were awful every time”) and manipulative (“one ticket off of your carousel”).

And the song gestures toward the reasons that the exiled object was cruel—like having a bad dad—but it doesn’t really matter in the end. He was still what he was, the relationship could not survive, and now he’s out in the cold on Christmas. It’s not clear whether or not the singer wishes the subject well or not. The song’s tone occupies an ambiguous place between “and another thing” and “I hope you’re fine, far away from me.” It’s not in the exact middle of these feelings. It’s on the bitter end:

But you should know that I died slow
Running through the halls of your haunted home
And the toughest part is that we both know
What happened to you
Why you’re out on your own
Merry Christmas, please don’t call

This isn’t like the Concrete Blonde song “Joey” (“I’m not angry anymore”), one of the other songs I like that’s addressed to somebody across a rift that seems more complicated than simply not talking anymore.⁴ This narrator is still angry, it’s just that this anger is filtered through, and complicated by, other things. “Being relatable” is not the primary value of a song, but the truth is that I do not find angry songs about how somebody is such a piece of shit all that relatable. I’ve never wanted to call somebody I actually loved a piece of shit.⁵ I enjoy the great, bombastic “I hate you” songs, of course, but as pieces of drama. They don’t call people to mind.

This hyphenated sad-angry, bitter-wistful, Merry Christmas–please don’t call world, on the other hand, I know very well. In a way what this song gets at is that there’s no inside or outside of a window. It splits the world. Even if you’re only to happy to leave, and even if you’re not the one in the cold, you’re always outside, too. So the song cycles between the “we” that was and the “you” and “me” that’s now.⁶ Inside-outside. There’s a little bit going on in the instrumental⁷ that sounds like you’re standing on one side of a train track waiting for a train to go by. Is there somebody on the other side? There’s a time you would have said, I hope so, yes. That time has passed. You wouldn’t say that now and yet no answer has replaced it.

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One reason “Merry Christmas, Please Don’t Call” is unlikely to become the next “Last Christmas” is because there’s a sound we expect from our Christmas music and it does not really have it (despite the valiant addition of some sleigh bells on this live performance).⁸ It’s really a song about Christmas, and specifically about the ways Christmas can be miserable, because inevitably there are things we remember that we’d rather not. But it doesn’t evoke Christmas, in the sense that it doesn’t have the sound that says “Christmas” to us.

You’d think that the atmosphere of nostalgia and the easily accessed, universally understood cultural images would mean that every year we got a great pop Christmas song. But we really don’t. Sabrina Carpenter and Carly Rae Jepsen both have warm voices that are well-suited to Christmas music, but Sabrina’s original Christmas music feels like one of those copies that’s been xeroxed so many times it’s unreadable. Meanwhile CRJ has a couple original Christmas songs. One is “fine.” The other is this nightmare:

There are new Christmas songs I hear sometimes and enjoy, but it’s barren out there. At some point you can’t be nostalgic for nostalgia, but nobody’s figured out a different way to write Christmas songs, so here we are.

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Of course there’s another reason sad Christmas songs are pleasurable, and it’s the same reason that so many Christmas songs stress how cold and terrible it is outside. That is simply if you’re having a good Christmas—and contrary to popular belief most people do⁹—you kind of enjoy the sadness.¹⁰ It’s the seasoning that brings out the cheer. You do not want to think about real people being sad, because you’re not a sadist, but you are happy thinking about how you, at this time, have successfully encased yourself in a fortress of cheer.

In brief, every winner needs a loser, so put on “River” and get weepy on the eggnog.

Whether you start making some ill-advised phone calls at that point is up to you.

1. I liked this quip from the recent Max Read Gift Guide: “Giving ornaments to tree people is the best gift because then they’re forced to revisit them every year and remember you.”

2. “Fairytale of New York” is not sad.

3. In his capacity as “Bleachers frontman.” “I will listen to this song,” some of you are thinking, “but I’ll break out in hives if I hear Jack Antonoff’s production or voice.” That is a weird problem to have… but I got you:

He and Hayley Williams also did it live:

4. “Joey” is not a sad Christmas song, but it could be with a couple of tweaks.

5. But life is long.

6. Thinking about it I go to this well of “you” “me” “we” a fair bit… but you know… how does a one and a one become a two… there are whole parts of Plato dedicated to this problem… I think.

7. Very technical musical language.

8. Also, it has a saxophone.

9. Somebody’s not gonna wait until the footnote at the end of the sentence, so: Suicides do not spike around the holidays. They drop.

10. Suicides do not spike around the holidays. They drop.