The Real Stories Behind 8 Classic Christmas Songs

Here’s the one that always gets people: “Jingle Bells” isn’t a Christmas song at all. James Lord Pierpont wrote it about sleigh races — young men racing horses through the snow, flirting with girls, occasionally tipping the whole sleigh into a snowbank. There’s not a word about Christmas in it. When it first appeared in 1857 it was called “The One Horse Open Sleigh,” and by most accounts it was tied to a Thanksgiving program, not December at all.

It also holds a record nobody would have predicted: it was the first song ever broadcast from space. On December 16, 1965, the Gemini VI astronauts radioed Mission Control about a strange object in a “polar orbit” — then pulled out a smuggled harmonica and a handful of sleigh bells and launched into “Jingle Bells.” A prank, played on Earth, from orbit.

Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas” for the 1942 film Holiday Inn, and the story goes that when he finished it he told his secretary he’d just written the best song anybody had ever written. For once, the bragging held up. Bing Crosby’s recording became the best-selling single of all time — Guinness has confirmed it, with sales estimated north of 50 million copies.

What most people don’t hear in it is the ache underneath. Berlin was a Jewish immigrant writing a Christmas song, and the lyric is really about longing — someone far from home, dreaming of Christmases the way they “used to know.” During World War II that hit soldiers overseas hard, which is a good part of why it took hold the way it did.

Rudolph didn’t come from folklore or a fairy tale. He came from a department store. In 1939 the Montgomery Ward chain wanted a giveaway booklet to hand out to shoppers at Christmas, and they handed the job to a staff copywriter named Robert L. May. He came up with a misfit reindeer, mocked for the very thing that turns out to save the day — a story May, who’d been a shy and picked-on kid himself, felt personally.

Montgomery Ward gave away millions of copies. The song came a decade later, when May’s brother-in-law Johnny Marks set the story to music and Gene Autry recorded it in 1949. So the reindeer we treat as ancient tradition started life as a piece of retail marketing — one that outlived the store that dreamed it up.

You’ve probably heard the tale: on Christmas Eve, 1818, the organ in a little Austrian church broke down, so the priest and the schoolteacher hastily wrote a carol for guitar instead — and “Silent Night” was born out of an emergency. It’s a wonderful story. It’s also mostly a legend. Historians point out that the broken-organ detail doesn’t show up until a book published in the United States in 1909, decades after the fact.

What’s solid is still lovely. Joseph Mohr had written the poem two years earlier, in 1816. On Christmas Eve 1818 he brought it to organist Franz Xaver Gruber in the village of Oberndorf and asked for a melody he could sing with guitar accompaniment. Whether the organ was truly broken or Mohr simply wanted his guitar, the carol they made that night has since been sung in hundreds of languages.

This is the saddest-sounding of the cheerful carols, and there’s a reason. Hugh Martin wrote it for Judy Garland to sing in Meet Me in St. Louis, and his first version was genuinely bleak: “Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last. Next year we may all be living in the past.” Garland refused to sing something that grim to a small child in the scene, and Martin, after some pushing, softened it.

His revision gave us the bittersweet line “until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.” Years later Frank Sinatra wanted something brighter for a Christmas album, so Martin changed it once more to “hang a shining star upon the highest bough.” That’s the sunnier version most of us grew up on — but the wistfulness in the melody is a fingerprint from that first, darker draft.

In 1984 Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats watched a BBC report on the famine in Ethiopia and couldn’t shake it. He called up Midge Ure of Ultravox, the two of them wrote a song in a hurry, and then Geldof did the improbable part: he talked half of the British pop world into showing up at a London studio on a single November day to record it. Bono, Sting, George Michael, Phil Collins, Boy George — all of them crowding around the microphones.

“Do They Know It’s Christmas?” went straight to number one and raised an astonishing amount of money for famine relief. It’s the odd carol on this list that was written not to sell records or fill a movie scene, but to do something — and it more or less invented the modern charity single in the process.

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire… Jack Frost nipping at your nose.” It’s the most wintry lyric imaginable, so here’s the twist: it was written in the middle of a blazing summer heat wave. In July 1945, songwriter Bob Wells jotted down a few lines about cold weather on a notepad, purely as a way to feel cooler. His writing partner Mel Tormé walked in, saw the scribbles, and something clicked.

By Tormé’s own account, the whole thing was finished in about forty minutes — words and music both — while the two of them sweated it out at the piano. Nat King Cole recorded it the following year, and his warm, unhurried version became definitive. All that snug December imagery, dreamed up by two men trying to beat the summer heat.

Its pa-rum-pum-pum-pum feels timeless, like something handed down for centuries, but the song was written by an American composer named Katherine Kennicott Davis in 1941. She originally called it “Carol of the Drum” and published it as a Czech traditional tune she’d freely adapted — though, curiously, no one has ever tracked down the Czech original she was pointing to.

Davis, a former teacher, said the idea came to her one afternoon while she was trying to nap. The song sat quietly for years until the Harry Simeone Chorale recorded it in 1958 and turned it into a holiday standard. The boy with no gift but his drum has been keeping time ever since.