Why have there been no new Christmas classics for 30 years?

OK, a little bit more specifically, here’s what needs explaining:

I imagine similar stories can be told about other countries, but certainly least in the UK, it has been a full 30 years now since the last new song came along and entered the canon of established Christmas classics that we all know and hear on repeat every year in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

That of course was Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’. (Although arguably another one – East 17’s ‘Stay Another Day’ – was released around the same time and in fact beat Carey’s song to No. 1 in the UK Singles Charts that Christmas. ‘Arguably’ because there’s nothing explicitly Christmassy in the lyrics.)

Granted, there are a few songs released more recently that you could make an argument for counting as Christmas classics, but a) there are none that are clearly and indisputably in that category, and b) even the arguable cases are few and far between, outliers, exceptions.

An article published in WIRED UK in 2019 – so, at the 25-year mark – put this trend down simply to Christmas being an inherently nostalgic time and Christmas classics taking a while to be minted as such.

But in the decades running up to 1994, there was a steady stream of new songs being released and pretty much immediately accepted as Christmas classics, i.e. played a lot every Christmas from that point on. And that was the case right back to the dawn of pop music, basically.

OK, not every song on the illustrative list below was adopted right away – some had to wait for covers or re-releases a few years later – but most were:

Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town – 1934
Winter Wonderland – 1934
White Christmas – 1942
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas – 1944
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! – 1945
The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire) – 1946
Sleigh Ride – 1948
Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer – 1949
It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas – 1951
Santa Baby – 1953
Jingle Bell Rock – 1957
Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree – 1958
Do You Hear What I Hear? – 1962
It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year – 1963
A Holly Jolly Christmas – 1964
Happy Xmas (War Is Over) – 1971
Merry Xmas Everybody – 1973
I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day – 1973
Lonely This Christmas – 1974
Mary’s Boy Child – 1978
Wonderful Christmastime – 1979
Stop the Cavalry – 1980
Walking in the Air – 1982
Do They Know It’s the Christmas? - 1984
Last Christmas – 1984
Merry Christmas Everyone - 1985
Driving Home for Christmas – 1986
Fairytale of New York – 1987
All I Want for Christmas Is You – 1994

So the WIRED explanation, while it might well get at some important factors, cannot be close to the whole story. Something important has changed since 1994.

Of course many important things have changed since 1994.

Perhaps the most obviously relevant is the mass adoption of satellite TV and the internet, and the cultural fragmentation that has accompanied these developments. Basically, we don’t all watch and read and listen to the same media to the extent we did before the mid-90s, and, especially in the past 15 years or so, many of us have even been more likely to take the personal music recommendations of YouTube and Spotify algorithms than the general music recommendations of human DJs and music critics. Consequently, few songs released in recent years have reached the proportion of the population that big hits did in the 80s and earlier, and as Christmas songs are a fairly small subset of all the songs being released, the chances of making it big like that are even slimmer for them. According to this explanation then, there may well still be some great Christmas songs being made, just they’re not reaching that wide audience. I can certainly think of Christmas songs from the last 30 years – including Keane’s ‘A Heart to Hold You’ (2004) and Tim Minchin’s ‘White Wine in the Sun’ (2009) – that are among my personal favourites but that are not all that widely known. Then again, thinking along these lines, we might expect there to be very little in the way of a cannon of Christmas classics at all anymore; we might expect to hear altogether different sets of Christmas songs in different settings. But no, the opposite seems to be true. We hear, in supermarkets, in adverts, on buses and at Christmas parties, largely the same set of Christmas songs that we’ve been hearing for the last 30 years at least. Maybe the explanation for this is that Christmas is a time of togetherness, and so those choosing the songs look for consensus, for broad appeal – and of course many people from before the mid-90s are still around, and they’ve passed their beloved Christmas songs on to the rest of us, so, insofar as there is consensus to be had, it’s for the pre-mid-90s stuff.

Now, strikingly, we don’t seem to mind this. There doesn’t seem to be any great clamour for new Christmas songs. And maybe this is itself part of the explanation for why there aren’t more entering the canon. I mean to say, a second kind of explanation of this phenomenon might be that we kind of just have enough Christmas classics now. Enough to fill the playlists and not bore people too much. And they are all, in some sense, of a pretty high standard. OK, some I could take or leave, but some I absolutely love – and I get a real thrill when I hear them again for the first time after all those months, and Christmas would not feel right for me without them. I guess other people absolutely love other ones. And they’ve all got memories attached to them, of course, for all of us. So yeah, I can imagine it is hard for a newcomer to break in now, to take significant airtime away from one or more of those already established classics. The fact is that, over all those years when new Christmas classics were being admitted to the cannon, the overall quantity of the Christmas songs to choose from was rapidly increasing, as was the number of them that were, by whatever standards, really good. Maybe around 1994 we reached a kind of limit, and we now just have enough that are good enough for our purposes. You might ask why the same apparently isn’t true of music generally? What makes Christmas different, I suppose, is that it’s a time-bound tradition. We seem to be satisfied – indefinitely satisfied – with just one birthday song, have been for far longer than 30 years; maybe we’re now similarly satisfied with a few dozen Christmas songs. (There are the carols as well, let’s not forget – probably been even longer since we’ve added one of those to the mix.)

Another thought we might have here is that our whole Christmas tradition, like our birthday tradition, is not really evolving these days. Of course it has evolved a lot over the decades, even more so over the centuries… we had the Pagan winter solstice, then we got the Christian Nativity stuff, then St Nicholas, a.k.a. Santa Claus, morphed into Father Christmas, somewhere along the line we added Christmas trees and their decorations, the carols, Santa’s elves and reindeer and flying sleigh and North Pole HQ, his red suit, stockings, mistletoe, advent calendars, the crackers with their paper crowns and terrible jokes, Christmas puddings, Brussel sprouts, etc. It’s quite an elaborate tradition when you think of it. And it’s hard, at least for me, to think of any additions or changes that have occurred in the last 30 years. That doesn’t mean there won’t be further changes in future. But, after a period of perhaps unusually rapid changes over the 20th century, the tradition does seem to be fairly stable for now. Why? Well, maybe it generally satisfies us – as, according to one hypothesis, the current selection Christmas songs does. Or maybe both the stasis in our canon of classic Christmas songs and the stasis in our general Christmas tradition could be explained by other factors. For instance, maybe both have something to do with, again, satellite technology and the internet, and how they’ve increased the pervasiveness of mass media, mass communication, causing us all to be bombarded from all sides with information on what Christmas is supposed to look like and sound like, with the consequence being more and more homogenisation in Christmas practices, and less and less room for mutations, so to speak, for local variations that then catch on… In other words, maybe our Christmas tradition, including the music we play, is hardly changing now compared to at some points in the past for similar reasons to those for which the central corpus of our language and pronunciation are hardly changing now compared to at some points in the past. Or we might point the finger especially at marketing, which has become both more pervasive and more sophisticated in recent decades, and which of course expertly invokes all the established elements of the Christmas tradition to get us to buy things, and, in the process, reinforces all those elements of the Christmas tradition – the songs included. Think again of where we hear those Christmas classics every year – adverts and supermarkets as much anywhere, right? And the music is telling us: get those presents, stock the cupboards for those parties and big family meals, create those great, memorable times you know you’re supposed to by buying all this stuff! And if the guy in charge of the work Christmas party playlist wants to achieve broad appeal with his song picks, the marketers do even more – they want to get as many people as possible in that big-spending Christmas mood. Maybe then our sense of how Christmas should be, including how it should sound, are just too firmly set now for us to easily embrace any serious innovation to / riffing on Christmas themes. Perhaps we would now only accept Christmas songs that sound very much like the old ones, but if they sound very much like the old ones, why bother? Particularly when the old ones are as good and, by this point, resonant as they are.

These complaints about the extreme commercialisation and homogenisation of Christmas suggest another theory. Maybe Christmas is not what it used to be. Maybe, generally speaking, it just doesn’t move us in quite the way it did 40 or 50 years ago, and so we – or the songwriters among us – don’t tend to feel the kinds of feelings from which new Christmas classics would result. If Christmases were indeed more magical in the past, there could be many reasons for that – not just that they were less commercial and homogenous. For instance, it may be that that magic relied on closer bonds with families and communities or even the whole country than we tend to have now, when the growing geographical distances and intergenerational and cultural divides among us make gatherings with long-term loved ones less likely to happen in the first place, and, if they do happen, more likely to be beset with awkwardness, arguments, superficiality, performativity, etc. Or maybe the magic relied on enough people taking the idea that it was a holy day, the birth of Christ, seriously, at least on some level of consciousness. Maybe it relied on a kind of genuine restfulness than we could experience – and experience together – before smartphones and social media and work emails and the boom in freelancing and zero-hours contracts and the culture of 24/7 services. Maybe it relied on a kind of headspace, a kind of presence that we don’t have so much of anymore. Or maybe it relied on a kind of material scarcity, or at least memories of such scarcity, that made gifts more meaningful. Maybe the fact that consumers goods of all kinds are just a click of a mouse away, and have come to cost less and less (while everything else has come to cost more and more) has changed how we feel about that core Christmas activity of gift-giving. Maybe it’s devalued that activity, for instance – and thereby caused inflation in it: maybe the pressure to give those closest to us something special, something that tops what they might buy for themselves any day of the year, and/or the pressure to give at least something to many people, mean that Christmas – especially given all the other expenses (the food, the decorations, the travel, etc.) – is actually a time of enormous stress for many of us, who are in straitened circumstances. Maybe that social pressure to be happy and generous, to do our bit for and make the most of this rare moment of togetherness and rest, can be toxic for us, as we strive to repress our thoughts of how we just can’t afford all this and concomitant thoughts of our general struggles or failure in life. Speaking of that rareness, maybe our expectations and demands of Christmas, encouraged by advertising and pop culture and by the more general dearth of experiences of togetherness and rest in our lives, have just become too great for Christmas to bear, such that it’s now often a heavy disappointment for many of us. Or maybe that old Christmas magic even relied, in this part of the world, on there being – as advertising and pop culture still show us there should be – more snow and ice and weather that created a different, special-feeling visual and auditory atmosphere, or on experiences of cold and relief from them in collective warmth. Of course there are parts of the world – even parts of the Anglosphere – where some of these points don’t apply, and those parts of the world could in theory contribute new songs to our Christmas canon. I don’t mean to suggest any of these points about how Christmases have changed for many of us could be the sole explanation, but add them all together, compounding one another, and it seems very plausible to me that they are an important part of the explanation.

Yet another idea we might consider – similar to, kind of blending into this one about Christmas not being what it used to be – is that we ourselves are not what we used to be. We are maybe not the Christmasy creatures who made those wonderful Christmas songs. We’ve grown up differently from previous generations. We live differently. We think and feel differently. We are perhaps, in general, more individualistic, more extrinsically motivated, more anxious and confused, less idealistic, more cynical and world-weary and arch, more medicated, more numbed and apathetic… I don’t know for sure if any of these things are quite true. Or true enough to make a big difference. But they do all seem fair questions to me, based on what I see around me and what I learn from the media. Would we have invented Christmas? Our generation? It doesn’t feel likely to me somehow. Black Friday is our contribution to the calendar. So maybe there are no new Christmas classics for much the same reason there are no new hits with the hopeful feel of 60s songs, say. We are not those naïve, optimistic creatures anymore, so those forms of self-expression do not come naturally to us anymore – even if we can still sometimes enjoy them. As for the forms of musical self-expression – the genres, the styles – that do come naturally to us today, they perhaps don’t accommodate those Christmas themes and motifs so well. What would a Christmas rap song be like? Maybe Christmas is, without our having acknowledged it yet, a kind of heritage industry.

Of course we can always hope and strive for renewal in any stagnant traditions we have. And it would be very surprising if Christmas and its playlist don’t undergo further big changes sooner or later. After all, taking the longer-term view, there have been many decades and centuries when neither have evolved much, and then look what happened in the last hundred years. Plus, as we all know, everything’s changing pretty fast these days.

Still, one final theory does seem worth mentioning… For any art form, there does have to be the question of how much variation and development it can accommodate. That might seem unlimited at a given moment, but then prove not to be. Take painting, for example. There was a time when no one had ever painted like Turner then did, or like Van Gogh then did, or Picasso, or Kandinsky… Enormous, striking development was possible in that art form. It’s not clear to me that such enormous, striking development is still possible in painting, or has been in recent decades. We may have largely exhausted the possibilities of that art form now. And similar doubts might be expressed about other art forms. I have, since at least my early teens, occasionally had the troubled thought that we might just run out of radically, excitingly new types of music one day, and I have heard the claim that music’s developing less now than it did over most of the last century – I doubt that’s true, and I think any impression that it is results from the aforementioned cultural fragmentation, which means that most really interesting developments in music recently have happened in cultural silos, and have not reached a wide audience. Still, it’s troubling to me that I don’t really have any sense of how far we are from that so-to-speak end of music, and it does seem to me that we can far more easily exhaust the possibilities of specific genres or styles. So maybe Christmas music is, in the absence of a really huge innovation, at the point where we’ve kind of exhausted its interesting possibilities. Glam Rock and Synth-Pop, when they came alone, really did take Christmas music in new directions though, and another genre could very plausibly come along and do the same; ‘Fairytale of New York’, meanwhile, is such a one-off, not at all like anything else we hear around Christmas. I guess so many innovations are possible, all it would take is another little tweak in the collective consciousness, or some letting through of what’s already there. Also fascinating to me is that basically the entire first half of the above list of Christmas classics is American in origin, while basically the entire second half is British in origin. What if another country took the lead next in generating our Christmas music? Thinking of ‘White Wine in the Sun’, I wonder if the Aussies fancy a go?