By Joanna Guldin
Glistening snow, reindeer paws, Grandma’s house, and … the battlefield?
Christmas music usually evokes warm memories, wishes for peace and the joy of the season. Yet many of our favorite holiday songs have deep connections to heart-wrenching conflict. According to a list of the 30 most-performed Christmas songs of all time generated by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, more than half draw their inspiration from World War II and the post-war era.
Criscrossing decades, continents and conflicts, here are some of the most intriguing stories behind a variety of beloved holiday songs:
‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’
Before becoming one of the most beloved pop Christmas songs in history, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” was the most requested song at overseas USO shows during WWII. During that conflict, composer Kim Gannon wrote the lyrics from the perspective of a deployed service member. His lyrics spoke first to a generation at war and then echoed through time as the most recorded Christmas song ever.
Initially recorded by Bing Crosby in 1943, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” was a nearly overnight sensation in America, hitting No. 3 on the Billboard charts. In 1944, the song made it into the top 20 during the holiday season. While the song was a beloved morale booster for American troops and their families, the managers of the BBC banned it on the airwaves in the United Kingdom, afraid that it would have the opposite effect for their war-torn and war-weary population.
‘I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day’
Made immortal by recordings from Crosby and Frank Sinatra, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” is a poem by seminal American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow set to music, most popularly by Johnny Marks. The song laments a world filled with sorrow and violence, but resolves on a hopeful note, wishing “peace on earth, good-will to men.” The original poem, “Christmas Bells,” wrestles more deeply with the reality of living in a country tearing itself apart.
Longfellow, an ardent New England abolitionist and pacifist during the Civil War whose entire family supported the Union cause, published the poem — which was first put to folk music a decade later — in a magazine for young people in 1864.
The poem draws heavily from myriad family tragedies that struck Longfellow’s family in the early 1860s. In 1861, Longfellow’s beloved second wife died horrifically in a fire. Longfellow’s nephew and wife’s half-brother both enlisted and were wounded on the battlefield. Most significantly, Longfellow’s oldest son, Charles, joined the Union Army in 1863. Longfellow was blindsided, receiving the news via post after Charles had already left to fight. Charles was quickly promoted to lieutenant in the Army of the Potomac and participated in the Battle of Mine Run, a little-known, but extraordinarily vicious chapter in the Civil War. Charles was nearly mortally wounded in a skirmish when a mine-ball ripped through his back. He survived the fray, and his father met him at Alexandria, Virginia, to escort him home to Concord to convalesce.
The Civil War was a font of inspiration for Longfellow, who published a sheaf of poems about the conflict, both during and after the war. It is likely that Longfellow had begun to think of the themes and phrases he would use in “Christmas Bells” years earlier. Echoes of the poem surface in Longfellow’s personal writings, including his despair upon hearing the grim news of the Second Battle of Manassas: “”Every shell from the cannon’s mouth bursts not only on the battle-field, but in far-away homes, North or South, carrying Dismay and death. What an infernal thing war is!” It is very probable that his son’s brush with death was the catalyst for “Christmas Bells” as it was written so shortly after Charles’ near-death experience during the holiday season.
Three stanzas of the original poem are not included in the song’s modern version, most likely because they speak directly to the Civil War:
Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
‘Snoopy’s Christmas’
Released by The Royal Guardsmen in 1967, “Snoopy’s Christmas” is a novelty song about a holiday encounter between our favorite cartoon beagle and his arch-nemesis. While, of course, the song is purely fictional, it draws heavily on a historical figure and event from World War I .
Snoopy’s foe is the Red Baron, a real Prussian fighter pilot who fought for Germany in WWI and whose exploits are the stuff of fiction. Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen left the cavalry in 1915 and quickly became one of the most feared and revered fighter pilots in world history. At the time of his 1918 death at the hands of British ace Major Lanoe Hawker VC, the “ace of aces” was credited with 80 kills.
“Snoopy’s Christmas” also references the much-storied “Christmas Truce of 1914.” Widespread battlefield truces between British and German troops on the Western Front were reported as short as a few hours or as long as a few days. The song’s theme of peace during conflict is often read as a statement against the Vietnam War.
‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ and ‘Silent Night’
Contemporary reports of various truces during the Christmas of 1914 include references to carols being sung by opposing troops. At times, these songs were sung back and forth between the trenches. Commonly, Germans sang “Silent Night” in their native tongue. In at least one instance, British and German forces joined together, singing “O Come All Ye Faithful” as the Latin version “Adeste Fidelis,” unified for at least a moment under a common language.
‘White Christmas’
Written by WWI veteran Irving Berlin a year before the U.S. entered WWII and first performed by Crosby days after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, “White Christmas” is one of the era’s most well-known and beloved songs. When it hit the airwaves in 1941, it virtually flopped, going all but unnoticed by a traumatized nation. It was only the next year, when it was featured prominently in the classic film “Holiday Inn,” that “White Christmas” climbed Billboard’s music popularity chart to No. 1 — and stayed there for 11 consecutive weeks.
The song’s appeal was especially pronounced in the ranks of the U.S. military. Service members requested the song from American Forces Network radio in droves and purchased thousands of copies of “White Christmas” on “victory discs” — durable records troops could carry with them on the front lines.
“White Christmas” became a holiday standard at overseas USO shows for Crosby. His nephew recounted that Crosby once performed “White Christmas” in Northern France. Ol’ Blue Eyes said it was the hardest thing he’d ever done: “He had to stand there and sing ‘White Christmas’ with 100,000 GIs in tears without breaking down himself. Of course, a lot of those boys were killed in the Battle of the Bulge a few days later.”
But why would “White Christmas” — a single that makes no mention of war — touch such a nerve with service members and the American public? Famed American poet Carl Sandburg observed in the Chicago Tribune that the frenzy around the song was tied directly to the war: “…, so much so that he should call war a blessing, we don’t like it. … The hopes and prayers are that we will see the beginnings of a hundred years of white Christmases — with no blood-spots of needless agony and death on the snow.”
‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’
Similar to “White Christmas,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” has no lyrical ties to war and yet became extremely popular during WWII. First performed by Judy Garland in the 1944 film “Meet Me in St. Louis,” the song was known to bring soldiers to tears when Garland performed it at the Hollywood Canteen during the war.
Decades later, the song still had sticking power with service members. Actress and singer Connie Stevens accompanied Bob Hope on USO tours during the Vietnam era. While flying above a Navy vessel with 2,700 sailors on board, Hope woke Stevens, saying that the admiral of the ship had requested her to speak to them. “I got up and went to the cockpit and made a speech to the boys and then I sang, ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.’ It was very poignant to me. There were so many men down in this black ocean,” Stevens remembered later.
‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’
The first member of the Beatles to release a solo Christmas album, John Lennon’s popular holiday classic is an outgrowth of his vocal opposition to the U.S.’s involvement in the Vietnam War. In 1969, 12 cities around the world hosted billboards with the message, “WAR IS OVER! If You Want It — Happy Christmas from John & Yoko,” paid for by Lennon and Yoko Ono. Two years later, Lennon would write and record a song with the same sentiment and nearly the same phrase. “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” did poorly in the U.S. — likely because it was released so close to Christmas, it had limited airplay — but found popularity and an enduring legacy after the singer/songwriter’s assassination in 1980.
‘O Holy Night’
A decade after it was written by a French village’s commissionaire of wines, “Cantique de Noel” caught the eye of an American abolitionist and writer. In 1855, John Sullivan Dwight was moved by a verse that declared, “Truly he taught us to love one another; his law is love and his gospel is peace. Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother; and in his name all oppression shall cease.”
Dwight translated the song, renamed it “O Holy Night” and published it in “Dwight’s Journal of Music.” The translation was well-received, especially in abolitionist circles, and served as an unofficial anti-slavery anthem for a nation teetering on the edge of civil war.
“O Holy Night” crops up in unverified battlefield legends. It is sometimes noted as one of the songs sung by French troops during 1914’s Christmas Truce and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
Courtesy of Military.com
