It’s Christmas! To get us all into the spirit, I thought I’d share some fun facts about Christmas songs that might surprise you... So here we go, 15 surprising Christmas Facts!
Europeans first sang carols thousands of years ago, but these were not the Christmas Carols we know today. They were pagan songs! They were written and sung during all four seasons, including the Winter Solstice celebrations, which usually happens around December 22nd. The word Carol means a dance or a song of praise and joy!
Christmas hymns are ancient though! I tried to find the definitive answer for what the most senior is - but there are quite a few opinions, so I’ve picked out a couple! A definite contender for the oldest still being played today is "O Come; O Come Emmanuel”, which has had quite a journey! Although it’s changed since the melody dates back to the 8th or 9th century. Latin lyrics were then added during the twelfth century, but it wasn’t translated into English until 1851. Another contender is ‘In Dulci Jubilo’. Whilst many of us will have heard the (sped up) instrumental version by Mike Oldfield released in 1975, According to German folklore, Heinrich Seuse wrote the song in 1328 after he heard the angels sing the words and joined them in a dance of worship.
Thurl Ravenscroft, the singer & voice artist responsible for the song "You're a Mean One, Mr Grinch” seen in the classic film ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas' also famously voiced Tony the Tiger, the mascot for Kellogg's Frosties.
The Beatles hold the record for most Christmas number 1 singles with FOUR, topping the charts in 1963, 64, 65 and 67. Cliff Richard (1960, 1988 and 1990) and The Spice Girls (1996, 1997 and 1998) have three each.
Speaking of the Beatles, many of us probably know that Beatle John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono penned the lyrics for Happy Xmas (War Is Over) as part of their peace activism, against the war in Vietnam. What you might not know is that Lennon was heavily influenced by the melody of another song - 'Stewball' by Peter, Paul and Mary, which is about a racehorse. Have a listen after this video - you’ll see they are pretty similar.
Bizarrely, there’s another Christmas song connected to the war in Vietnam. In April 1975, the American military played the music over Armed Forces Radio as a covert signal to evacuate both US soldiers and 6000 at-risk Vietnamese. The coded message went out over the radio: The temperature in Saigon is 105 degrees and rising.” Then, White Christmas played on the radio. In the following nineteen hours, 81 helicopters evacuated approximately 7,000 people.
Keeping with the “White Christmas” Theme - Bing Crosby's version of "White Christmas" is the highest-selling single of all time with over 50 million copies. Writer Irving Berlin foresaw its success when he wrote it, telling his secretary, “I just wrote the best song that anybody’s ever written!”
Bonus Fact - Irving Berlin hated Elvis Presley's version of "White Christmas" so much that he tried to prevent radio stations from playing Presley's cover.Despite Christmas being a traditionally Christian festival, Irving Berlin is one of many Jewish composers who wrote some of the most popular Christmas songs. "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" "Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree," and "Holly Jolly Christmas" were all written by Johnny Marks. "Let It Snow" was written by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn” and "Winter Wonderland" written by Felix Bernard and Richard B.Smith.
"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" was originally written for the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis. The director, Vincente Minelli and the stars of the film Judy Garland and Tom Drake both deemed the lyrics too sad and composer Hugh Martin had to rewrite sections to make it more upbeat. This included changing the lines "It may be your last / Next year we may all be living in the past" to "Let your heart be light / Next year all our troubles will be out of sight".
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer also has some sadness behind the happy song we hear today. The Montgomery Ward department store created the character as part of a series of holiday-themed colouring books given away by the retail giant back in 1939. They asked staff copywriter Robert L. May to create a poem tho accompany them. He based it on himself, with the red nose representing a feeling of being the odd one out and being picked on as a child. May’s brother in law was Johnny Marks, who we heard about earlier, he put the words to a melody, and Marks recorded it as a song ten years after the poem had been conceived by May.
Bonus fact: May nearly called the Reindeer ‘Reginald’ or even ‘Romeo!’ - but finally settled on Rudolph.The Christmas Song was written by songwriting partners Mel Torme and Bob Wells. On a hot summer's day, Mel visited Bob’s home and found a few lines scribbled on a notepad starting with “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire”. When Mel asked Bob why he’d written the lyrics, he replied that it was so hot that he had to write something to try and cool off and was imagining Christmas and the cold weather. Mel commented, “I think you might have got something here”, and the duo wrote the rest in just 45 minutes.
All I Want for Christmas by Mariah Carey is one of those Christmas songs that makes you get up on your feet and dance like a lunatic. It’s not just us humans who love it, either. A farmer named Angus Wielkopolski has claimed that his goats produce 20% more milk when listening to the track. He discovered through trial and error, first trying heavy metal and then Old Macdonald had a farm, before settling on Mariah. He plays it over and over and admits “The staff are probably sick of it now, but it works for the goats.”
Who earns the most royalties from their Christmas song? Well, it’s not just Angus the farmer playing All I Want For Christmas - According to research in 2016 - Mariah takes home just over half a million dollars for it each year! The Pogues only top her with from Fairytale of New York, Slade, who are thought to earn well over a million dollars per year from “Merry Christmas Everybody”. Singer and co-writer Noddy Holder said “It is definitely a pension plan”.
We associate "Jingle Bells" with Christmas, but it wasn’t a Christmas song when it was published! It was written by James Lord Pierpoint in 1857 and initially titled “The One Horse Open Sleigh”. It even featured different melody and lyrics! It was renamed to the title we all know two years later and didn’t become a Christmas favourite until Bing Crosby released his jazzy version in 1943.
"Jingle Bells" was also the first song played in space! Nine days before Christmas during NASA’s Gemini 6A voyage, the Astronauts gave this report to mission control: “We have an object, looks like a satellite going from north to south, up in a polar orbit.” The report sounded pretty serious but was then broken by the sound of “Jingle Bells” with Astro “Wally” Schirra playing a tiny harmonica accompanied by Tom Stafford shaking a handful of small sleigh bells they had brought along for the space voyage.
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Resources:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/skarlan/10-classic-christmas-songs-written-by-jewish-songw-82j3#.grP11G4kBk
http://www.npr.org/2000/12/25/1116021/white-christmas
http://entertainment.time.com/2012/12/17/yule-laugh-yule-cry-10-things-you-didnt-know-about-beloved-holiday-songs/slide/white-christmas/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Drake
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1569872,00.html
http://entertainment.time.com/2012/12/17/yule-laugh-yule-cry-10-things-you-didnt-know-about-beloved-holiday-songs/slide/rudolph-the-red-nosed-reindeer/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Martin
