Taylor Swift dominates both of Billboard‘s major charts this week with an album of re-recorded decade-old songs. Kelly Clarkson – “Underneath The Tree” (2013) “Do You Want To Build A Snowman” is not even about holiday-adjacent weather patterns like “Let It Snow” or “Winter Wonderland.” It’s about watching your relationship with your older sister deteriorate for mysterious reasons that you don’t comprehend and finding yourself depressed and alone in the luxurious castle that has become your prison. No matter how hard playlist curators and radio programmers try to shoehorn the Frozen soundtrack into the holiday music canon, it’s just not about Christmas at all.
But “Do You Want To Build A Snowman?” is not a Christmas standard because it is quite simply not a Christmas song. Is it a standard? Here’s the thing: Every Disney soundtrack song becomes a standard, especially tunes from a soundtrack as beloved as Frozen. Have other artists covered it? Performers including Nashville favorite Mickey Guyton, Australian The Voice alum Fatai, and YouTuber Hannah Cho have published takes of this song.
Is it good? Hell yeah it’s good! The Frozen soundtrack does not fuck around.ĭo people know it? Let me cast a knowing glance at every parent and child in the developed world and declare: Oh yes, people know “Do You Want To Build A Snowman?” Friends, the pickings are slim! Ariana Grande – “Santa Tell Me” (2014) Below, I consider some contenders for this “modern Christmas standard” designation with consideration of quality, ubiquity, and replication by other artists. I’m talking about an original song so unmistakably popular that we’ve collectively absorbed it into the unofficial Christmas canon - tunes everyone instinctively knows, that are simply in the air when the Christmas lights go up. With that in mind, has anyone released a new Christmas standard since 1994? I’m not talking about a fresh recording of a pre-existing song, which rules out oft-circulated covers by key Christmas Industrial Complex players like Michael Bublé, Pentatonix, and Trans-Siberian Orchestra. It might be the most recently released Christmas standard, but it’s hard to think of anything that happened during the first Clinton administration as recent anymore. Chronologically the song’s release is a lot closer to 1980s holiday staples like “Last Christmas” and “Wonderful Christmastime” than it is to the present. There are children who’ve been born since then who can legally rent a car, who’ve started families of their own. “All I Want For Christmas Is You” came out 27 years ago. Improbably - especially for someone with 19 #1 hits - it has become arguably Carey’s signature song and is universally regarded as a modern Christmas standard.īut that “modern” distinction is growing less and less accurate with each passing yuletide. It reached #1 for the first time in 2019 and returned to the top of the singles chart last year. In recent years, this has meant a massive surge in streams for Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” Although a hit upon release in 1994, Carey’s holiday classic is arguably bigger now than ever. Subsequently, here's a modern ranking of all the songs off "Home For Christmas." 14.Now that we’ve reached Thanksgiving week, the annual influx of Christmas music that begins as a slow creep in October is about to go into overdrive. Luckily a little thing called the Internet allowed me to revisit all the magical tracks off this timeless gem. My point is, that Home For Christmas CD was distributed with the rest, gone forever. Needless to say it would be another year before my taste in music shaped up, but that's beside the point. Everything from Britney Spears to Aaron Carter was given out to daughters of family friends, so I could make room for all that Evanescence. See, when I was 13 and entering my goth phase (which I am still in right now) I decided, at my parents' Christmas party no less, that I was going to purge all of the pop CDs from my collection. Sadly, it's been a while since I've listened to Nsync's album. Truth be told, I was more of a Backstreet Boy girl myself, but they really never maximized the whole Christmas angle.
I mean, I, Little Miss Gloom and Doom, had this CD. Of course if you were a tween of the late '90s (a time in which terms like "tween" didn't exist) you had this CD. And then there are the oft forgotten but totally important collectives, like the indisputable 1998 NSync masterpiece, Home For Christmas. There are quirky get-it-for-your-boyfriend-on vinyl delights like She & Him's A She and Him Christmas. There are $2.99 Best Buy bin CDs like Twisted sister's A Twisted Christmas. There's definitely a spectrum of quality within the tremendous pantheon of pop Christmas albums.
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