Twelve Songs of Christmas: #6—“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” by The Pretenders

Originally written in 1944 by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, and sung by Judy Garland in the movie Meet Me in St. Louis, this is one of the most-performed classic Christmas songs, and also one with many different lines. The original was far more melancholy, and through the years, lines have been changed to try to make the tone a bit more upbeat.

Balderdash. Leave the song alone. I like a little sadness with my eggnog. You see, you can't experience joy without a little sadness, too. (Don't understand? Go watch Pixar's InsideOut and then come read the rest of the blog.) Christmas comes at the end of the year. It gets dark at 4:30 in the afternoon. Everything is gray, bare, and dead. Winter and night are both metaphors for death in poetry. Are you getting the theme here?

Christmas, at its heart, is deadly serious business. God, the creator of all things, is coming into this shit-stained, murderous, greedy world as a baby. Worse, a Jewish peasant baby to an unwed couple controlled by the Roman Empire at the macro level, and more locally, a homicidal tyrant collaborator. He's being born into poverty and homelessness, and his life is going to end with an unjust, brutal public execution. Sing a happy tune about that, boys and girls!

Human life is just like that. We rejoice at a birth at the same time that we're celebrating a death. We love to spend time with family and friends during the holidays, but when you've lost someone you love, as my family has this year, the absence is overwhelming. Christmas reminds us of what we've lost. In one way, that's good, because it reminds us to be grateful and to cherish the moments we have with those around us, but to ignore the melancholy of the season is to deny its reality and its purpose.

That's why I love this song so much. It embraces the inherent sadness of the holiday and reminds us to find our happiness in spite of whatever it is that we've lost. For me, no other voice does this sentiment justice as much as Chrissy Hynde and The Pretenders from the 1987 album A Very Special Christmas. It's a beautiful interpretation of the ambivalence that the season brings.