Christmas Music Mirrors the Holiday

Dean and Britta and Sonic Boom, by Samantha Tyson

For many artists, making Christmas music has become a holiday tradition.

The new Christmas album A Peace of Us started life as a series of singles. In 2007, Dean & Britta released a 45 with covers of Roger Miller’s “Old Toy Trains” and garage band The Wailers’ “She’s Coming Home,” re-gendered as “He’s Coming Home.” The married couple Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips came together in the alternative rock band Luna, and they bent Miller’s lullaby and The Wailers’ holiday love song into their spare musical world of deeply reverbed guitars and understated vocals, starting a tradition of holiday singles in the process. 

A Peace of Us features new versions of their holiday releases, fine-tuned by friend and collaborator Sonic Boom from Spaceman 3. The project started the way Christmas traditions do, as a one-time thing that was too much fun to only do once. Sonic Boom got into the game himself and recorded “I Wish it was Like Xmas Everyday” in 2020, and together they could hear ways to make Christmas songs from sources as different as a James Bond movie soundtrack, ‘60s pop singer Vic Dana, and Willie Nelson speak for them. 

Now, A Peace of Us presents Christmas music for people who’ve had enough of Andy Williams and Mariah Carey, putting Wareham, Phillips, and Sonic Boom’s fingerprints on the songs until they make sense as part of their musical world. “Snow Is Falling in Manhattan,” for instance, presents the David Berman-penned song as the Velvet Underground on December 25. The introduction evokes Lou Reed’s “Coney Island Baby” and “Walk on the Wild Side” until the melody kicks in, when Wareham deadpans his vocals enough to bring Reed to mind. They transform the country pop of Willie Nelson’s “Pretty Paper” by wrapping it in an electronic throb that brings to mind New York electronic minimalists Suicide, minus their urban dread.

In its way, A Peace of Us reinforces a theory pop producer David Foster advanced in an interview with The New York Times. “The public prefers the old classics, and isn’t too interested in new songs,” he said. Foster believes nostalgia drives the Christmas music market, and the charts suggest he’s right. Each December, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You,” Wham!’s “Last Christmas,” Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock,” and Burl Ives’ “Holly Jolly Christmas” return to Billboard’s Top 10 alongside the hitmakers du jour.

Dean & Britta and Sonic Boom didn’t write any new songs for the album, but they don’t embrace the Christmas canon that Foster did on Christmas Songs, the 2023 album he recorded with his wife, Katharine McPhee. Foster and McPhee recorded familiar versions of familiar songs, whereas the best known songs on A Peace of Us are “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and “Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth” by Bing Crosby and David Bowie. Both have strong constituencies, but they’re not the standards that Sinatra, Dean Martin, Andy Williams, Peggy Lee, and the great singers of another era made synonymous with Christmas. 

Still, when Wareham, Phillips, and Sonic Boom chose more obscure covers, the musical worlds and eras they come from can almost always be heard in the songs’ underpinnings. The acoustic guitar signals ‘70s country music when they take on Merle Haggard’s bleak “If We Make It Through December,” so the past can be heard in a version that’s true to them now.

Many indie artists missed Foster’s memo, and ChristmasUnderground.com scours Bandcamp for new, contemporary indie Christmas music. On my Christmas music podcast Twelve Songs of Christmas, I’ve talked to many artists who have found ways to make Christmas music address their worlds. British indie rock band Les Bicyclettes de Belsize released “A Very Indie Christmas,” a love letter to the golden era of British pop influenced by the NME C86 cassette compilation.

The British punk band Goddammit Jeremiah cut 26 Christmas tracks over six or so years, enough to put out The Christmas Collection. As the title “What if Santa Claus is just 20 ferrets in a red suit?” suggests, they don’t take the holiday or the music too seriously, but they make the songs reflect their musical personality. Under the name É Arenas, Eduardo Arenas from Chicano Batman has released a series of Cumbia Navideñas, Spanish-language Christmas songs that reference traditions and musicians that are part of his Latinx experience growing up in Los Angeles.

Arenas’ songs began as an effort to make music that didn’t fit Chicano Batman and flex some musical muscles on instruments that the band didn’t need from him. In 2017, the one-off goof “Bu​ñ​uelos a Monton” that focused on his grandmother cooking for the family’s Christmas celebration became the start of something bigger. His songs are a reminder that the sounds associated with Christmas are culture-specific, and the body of Spanish-language holiday music doesn’t necessarily come with sleigh bells and familiar melodies. Arenas sings for his audience though, and takes cues from musical references who are important to him including the Mexican singer Rigo Tovar, whose musical signatures influenced Arenas’ “El Perdoń.”  

Last year, his “Tuki Tuki” honed in on the sing-along part of “Mi Burrito Sabanero,” a Mexican Christmas songs that children learn as it tells the story of the donkey that carried Mary and Jesus to Bethlehem. It sounds like a children’s song, but Arenas worked with a lyrical assist from his wife to craft a version that would make his friends and family dance. This year he took a second bite at that apple, pairing the new “Mi Burrito Sonidero” with “Noche de Paz,” a cool take on “Silent Night.” 

Like Arenas, indie folk artist Sara Noelle has made a project of releasing new Christmas music each year. Unlike Dean & Britta, at least one of the songs is always new. This year Noelle paired the new “Little Dove” with her own take of “Silent Night,” one that pulses with a motorik measured intensity. 

Like Arenas and Dean & Britta, Noelle’s songs feel like another homegrown Christmas tradition, the way the Christmas dinner menu and the movies-that-must-be-watched evolved from a good night into a yearly imperative. The feelings associated with traditions fuel nostalgia, and each new iteration is experienced with memories of the previous ones in mind.

Noelle’s songs, like Dean & Britta’s, live as one-offs, as part of her body of Christmas music, as Christmas music, and as part of the larger body of music she makes the rest of the year. Her electronically enhanced breathy coo in 2022’s “Winter’s Glow,” for instance, is so pronounced that it mimics the sound of the wind blowing snow outside the house at night. If you know Merry Christmas, the Christmas album of beautiful background music by actor Jackie Gleason in 1956, you’ve heard voices similarly breathing the melodies, almost indistinguishable from the sounds on a snowy December night.

If you don’t have that reference, you can still hear “Winter’s Glow” next to Noelle’s first Christmas song, “Christmas at Sea,” from 2020. There too, the electronic processing on her voice enhances the sibilant sounds, but in 2020 she chopped her voice up as if she’s at sea and the waves only allow us to hear so much. The vocal on “Winter’s Glow” seems more direct, so it’s tempting to hear it as growth.

One of the great Christmas albums is 1963’s A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector, and its title used to be the premise behind Christmas albums—they were gifts from stars to the fans. The Spector album aside, their gifts were effectively store-bought, off the rack, and only the best were memorable. A Peace of Us, the songs by Sara Noelle, É Arenas, Goddammit Jeremiah, and the work by many indie artists feel closer to a genuine spirit of giving. Their songs reflect them and their art, and that’s the kind of gift we treasure.

Note: An earlier version of this piece appeared in the December 2024 issue of Antigravity. It has been updated to expand on a few thoughts that didn’t fit on the page and to include new music by Sara Noelle and É Arenas. Thanks to Antigravity for giving it a good home.