The Science Behind Christmas Music: What Makes Songs Festive
Within the first notes of many classic Christmas songs, listeners are transported directly to the festive season. But what exactly transforms ordinary music into something unmistakably Christmassy?
The Semiotics of Seasonal Sound
Popular music researcher Philip Tagg explores this phenomenon in his work Music's Meanings, applying semiotics to understand how we interpret musical signs. These auditory cues may be perceived differently by various listeners and can evolve in meaning over time.
Tagg illustrates this concept through the pedal guitar, originally from Hawaiian musical tradition. The instrument eventually found its way into country music so successfully that listeners now immediately associate it with that genre, rather than its Pacific origins.
Sleigh Bells: The Ultimate Christmas Shorthand
For Christmas music, one instrument serves as the ultimate seasonal identifier: sleigh bells. From Prokofiev's orchestral Troika (1933) to Ariana Grande's contemporary Santa Tell Me (2014), these distinctive chimes have provided composers with convenient festive shorthand.
The association stems from practical origins. Christmas traditionally coincides with winter weather and snow, making sleighs essential transport. The bells warned pedestrians of approaching sleighs, creating a direct link between the sound and the season. This connection has become so embedded that sleigh bells now evoke Christmas directly, bypassing any conscious thought of actual sleighs.
The broader bell family contributes to this sonic landscape. Church bells, particularly those celebrating Christ's birth, have established larger bells as fixtures in Christmas music, decorations, and artistic representations.
The Data Behind Festive Favourites
The UK Official Charts Company's analysis of the "top 40 most-streamed Christmas songs" reveals bell-like sounds in the majority of entries. These range from the glockenspiel introduction in Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You (1994) to the synthesised tubular bells in Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas (1984).
Other Christmas musical elements include lyrical melodies and prominent brass sections. These components share a common characteristic: they evoke the past rather than contemporary pop sensibilities.
Nostalgia as Musical Currency
Christmas functions as a fundamentally nostalgic holiday. The term "nostalgia" originally described homesickness, though it now encompasses fond remembrance of bygone times. Both definitions apply to Christmas sentiments.
The season encourages geographical and temporal journeys home, immersing people in familiar traditions where everyday pace doesn't apply. Artists capitalise on this nostalgia through music, lyrics, and visuals that evoke earlier eras.
This explains why most Christmas albums feature interpretations of established classics rather than original material. The familiar provides immediate emotional connection, though some artists take nostalgia further by emulating the quintessential Christmas style: easy listening crooner songs.
The Crooner's Christmas Legacy
Artists like Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole established the warm, crooning voice nestled within light orchestral arrangements as the archetypal Christmas sound. This style rarely appears outside the festive season unless listeners have specific affinity for it.
When Billie Eilish performed Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas on Saturday Night Live in 2023, she abandoned her usual synthesised approach for traditional piano, drums, and upright bass, delivering vocals in a gentle, warming tone. The arrangement evokes an imagined, simpler past of chestnuts by the fire and picturesque snowfall.
The Perfect Christmas Formula
Michael Bublé's 2011 album Christmas demonstrates this formula's effectiveness, placing two entries in the top 20 most-streamed Christmas songs. The album features crooned vocals throughout, lightly orchestrated versions of classic Christmas songs, and yes, sleigh bells. It represents the complete Christmas musical package.
Understanding these musical elements reveals how composers and artists tap into deeply embedded cultural associations, transforming ordinary songs into vehicles for seasonal transport.