Flashback, December 1971: Lennon’s Yule Classic, ‘Happy Xmas,’ Released

Released 50 years ago this week, while American soldiers were still dying in Vietnam, “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” did not enjoy the kind of immediate success that John Lennon was used to. But the single from the ex-Beatle and wife Yoko Ono has since become a staple of the holidays.

The single was so melodic that some have decried it for sappiness. (Producer Phil Spector noted its resemblance to The Paris Sisters’ 1961 hit “I Love How You Love Me.”)

But Lennon wanted to leave listeners with more than the cheerful ditties that he, Paul, George and Ringo used to send each Christmas to members of members of their fan club.

As a religious skeptic who had caused a firestorm of controversy by claiming that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus,” he would not write a hymn to Christ the Redeemer. Likewise, he was uninterested in evoking the sleigh rides or winter landscapes that had increasingly filled the pop airwaves in the last few decades.

What he aimed for was, in part, a challenge—another attempt, like “Give Peace a Chance,” to attempt to rally sentiment against the Vietnam War through the power of music. His song’s refrain, “War is over (if you want it),” put to musical use a slogan of his “Bed in for Peace” protest with Yoko in late spring 1969.

The tune, recorded in late October 1971, came too late in the year for it to be promoted adequately in time for the Christmas season. (One singular exception: Lennon’s performance on the song in a December 16 appearance on The David Frost Show.)

From the last days of the Beatles through most of his decade as a solo artist, Lennon was engaged in a competition with Paul McCartney. One manifestation of that rivalry can be seen in their respective biggest Christmas hits as solo artists. Before he was murdered in 1980, it would not have been out of character for Lennon to compare his major solo Christmas song with McCartney’s, “Wonderful Christmastime.”

In the U.S., “Happy Xmas” peaked at number 36 on the Cash Box Top 100 Singles and number 28 on the Record World Singles Chart. Over in the U.K., matters were even worse, as a publishing-rights dispute between Lennon and music publisher Northern Songs led the song to be delayed for a year. “Wonderful Christmastime” didn’t do particularly well, either, in the U.S., reaching only number 83 on the Cash Box Top 100 Singles chart.

But in terms of how other artists how viewed the tunes, matters have shifted more decidedly Lennon’s way. The Website Second Hand Songs, which tracks song covers, lists approximately 100 interpretations of “Wonderful Christmastime” by other artists, versus more than 2 ½ times that amount for “Happy Christmas.”

The question of other artists’ interpretation of the song came to the forefront for me over 30 years after its release, when Sheryl Crow sang it live as part of the televised Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting in 2002. One year after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, with an attack on Iraq being prepared for the following year, Lennon’s call for collective responsibility (“Another year over/And what have we done?”) retained its melancholy undertone.

Nearly 30 years later, it still does, along with its appeal to universal brotherhood and the instinct for peace that crosses so many spiritual traditions.

Song Lyric of the Day (‘O Come All Ye Faithful,’ With a Coded Message?)

“O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant,

O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem;

come and behold him born the King of angels.”— “O Come All Ye Faithful,” Latin lyrics attributed to English music teacher John Francis Wade (c. 1711-1786), English translation by Roman Catholic convert, priest, and author Frederick Oakeley (1802-1880)

“O Come All Ye Faithful” has long been one of my favorite Christmas hymns, a clarion call to all Christians to celebrate the birth of the baby Jesus. Never did I attach any political content to the lyrics.  

Then, the other night, while channel-surfing, I came across Lucy Worsley’s Christmas Carol Odyssey. I had never heard of Lucy Worsley before, but over in the U.K. they evidently can’t get enough of this Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces who has stepped away from the dusty books of her daytime job to enjoy healthy extracurricular pastimes as a writer of history books and TV presence.

Henry VIII, one of the figures Ms. Worsley has discussed, might have called this blonde-bobbed “presenter” a “saucy wench,” what with all her delight in dressing up in assorted period costumes for the cameras. Hardly was I done blinking at one of these get-ups when I was floored by one of her contentions: that “O Come All Ye Faithful,” far from being apolitical, represented a coded call to arms for Britain’s beleaguered Roman Catholics in the mid-18^th century.

Of Irish Catholic descent myself, I understand how people of the faith might have needed to tread warily before “Catholic Emancipation” arrived in 1829. But as someone with a vital interest in history, I also crave proof of hidden meanings in songs, preferably documented by the written word. So I tend to regard imputations of covert Catholic content in much the same way as contentions that Shakespeare was a practicing, recusant member of the faith: interesting, sure, but requiring a greater connecting of the dots.

Yet here was Ms. Worsley, chatting amiably as a balding, bespectacled male scholar (the kind she most assuredly was not!) turned the pages of a book, explaining that the initial stanza penned by John Francis Wade was a rallying cry for Jacobites awaiting the return of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Stuart claimant to the throne of Great Britain in the 1740s.

The invocation to fideles in the Latin original was a signal for Catholics on the continent to come home to participate in the Stuart restoration, this scholar claimed. The “King of Angels” was dashing young Bonnie Prince Charlie himself, grandson of the ousted King James II, ready to launch a rebellion to reclaim his rightful throne. ("Joyful and triumphant"? Not quite. But that's a blog post for another time...)

True? I’m not sure. But it does provide a startling new way of looking at a set of holy days and the traditions encrusted to them—and a reminder that, from time immemorial in the secular world, people have looked to religion to deliver them from their everyday despair.

(The image accompanying this post is a 2013 performance of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” by the King’s College Choir, Cambridge, posted on YouTube.)

Quote of the Day (A Climate-Change Xmas Carol from ‘The New Yorker’)

“Sleigh bells ring, are you listening?  

In L.A., hail is glistening.      

In New Mexico, there is six feet of snow.     

The desert is a winter wonderland!”— Ethan Kuperberg, “Shouts and Murmurs: Climate-Change Christmas Carols,” The New Yorker, Dec. 22 and 29, 2014 issue         

Song Lyric of the Day (Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, With a Xmas Song “In Three-Quarter Time”)

" ‘Merry Christmas, may your New Year dreams come true’
And this song of mine in three-quarter time
Wishes you and yours the same thing, too.”—“The Christmas Waltz,” lyrics by Sammy Cahn (pictured), music by Jule Styne (1954)

At one time, this particular tune was among the most heavily recorded in the Great American Songbook, at least around holiday time. Then, for a number of years, it seemed to fade.

And now? Making a comeback, I strongly suspect. Some fairly prominent performers have covered it over the years, including Peggy Lee, Audra McDonald, Kristen Chenoweth, Barry Manilow, Clay Aiken, the Carpenters and, of course, Frank Sinatra.

But this year it’s being covered in a holiday CD from She and Him (better known as Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward). In this YouTube video from their appearance on the "Tonight Show with Jay Leno," they show that the secret of the song lies in simplicity: stripped-down arrangements backing utterly heartfelt vocals.

As the song began to be played more recently, my frustration in identifying it grew. No hook gave me a clue as to its title--at least, none that I could hear.

In the end, the person who helped me unravel this mystery was the person who had made me cognizant of this tune in the first place: veteran deejay Jonathan Schwartz. Repeated listenings over the radio—especially Sinatra’s near-definitive version—subconsciously made me aware of its almost Old World appeal. What song form could embrace this?

It was probably after Schwartz played a Stephen Sondheim number—maybe the deceptively lilting “Could I Leave You?” from Follies, or, more likely, the entire soundtrack for A Little Night Music—before I tied the song’s form to the phrase that lingers the most in my mind: “this song of mine in three-quarters time.” At last I understood: Of course—it was a waltz. A Christmas waltz.

By the way, this is one of a very substantial list of Christmas songs written by Jewish composers and lyricists. Where would we be in the holidays without Cahn, Styne, Torme, Berlin, Livingston, Evans, Marks, Parrish, etc.? Musically diminished, that’s for sure. For many of us, Christmas is not only about exchanging gifts (and, yes, people, Jesus' birth), but also about love manifested to us each other, seldom more so than in the joy that bursts out in song--including this one, in three-quarter time.