TOP TEN HOLIDAY SONGS

Profonde Musique

Dec 16, 2025

This is going to be fun. If nothing else, it’s a challenge. Everyone who knows anything about me knows it is holiday music (any holiday music) that’s my least favorite. Themed tunes for seasons do not do it for me. Of course, I write about music, and I dig all genres, but on the whole, holiday music is not my bag. I believe the word “hate” has been thrown around far too often this time of year, especially since the Christmas nonsense starts in September, when we are inundated by a phalanx of seasonal theme music. Restaurants, department stores, offices, elevators, etc. are ringing out these tunes from every corner. And most of these songs are not good. And a few don’t have a thing to do with the season (I don’t know when Leonard Cohen’s gorgeous pean to sexual depravity became a holiday standard but listen to the lyrics to “Halleluiah” and tell me I’m wrong.) I’ve covered this in Profonde Musique before. It’s just odd. But, then again, like all music, there are, indeed, holiday gems. And that is the core of this week’s “List.” Let’s celebrate those tunes that get this right. But what is right?

Glad you asked.

Some parameters before we begin – because as much as I mostly despise holiday song cycles, I adore parameters in music essaying.

Firstly, none of these songs are about a character – no talking snowmen or odes to jolly St. Nick or an outcast reindeer with nasal electricity. If these characters appear in a line or two to evoke a sense of comfort for the listener, I allow it. Nothing against Santa-centric tunes, some have merit, but they’re not relevant here and are mostly for children. Maybe next year, if I am still around and Profonde Musique is still a thing, I’ll do “Best Children’s Holiday Songs.” Deal? Cool. Also, no classical pieces. This includes anything by Handel. No soundtrack stuff either (apologies to the late, great, Vince Guaraldi, you define this season for me, but I need lyrics.) And, finally, no joke tunes or novelty records about slain grandmothers, singing chipmunks, or a list of Jewish celebrities under the guise of a Hannukah song.

If we’re all on the same page, let’s do this thing!      

10. “Winter Wonderland” – Ella Fitzgerald

Now, to be fair, anything sung by Ms. Ella Fitzgerald, arguably the finest American voice of the Twentieth Century, means we’ve entered Bonus Land. So, this version of the exceedingly charming “Winter Wonderland” from 1960 is my go-to. But “Winter Wonderland” was never supposed to be a “holiday song” (maybe it’s why I dig it?). Originally written and recorded in 1934, its composers, pianist and bandleader, Felix Bernard and lyricist Richard Bernhard Smith constructed it as an ode to the snowy tableau of Smith’s Pennsylvania hometown, Honesdale, specifically its Central Park. But when Christmas tunes became a chart-invading concept, thanks to a certain Jewish fellow whose initial secular holiday song exploded the genre (further up this list), it became a seasonal standard.

I could be wrong, but it may be the first song of its type to mention making a snowman, and in this case a doppelganger for a clergyman named Brown. And like most songs on this list, “Winter Wonderland” has legs, boasting a ton of covers, some 200. Its delightfully trite melody and brain-scarring refrain make it a serviceable singalong, but in Ella’s hands it becomes a toasty delight.

9. Father Christmas – The Kinks

This is hands-down the best rock and roll holiday song. Yeah, it’s about Santa (I broke my rule already?), but no! This is no mere North Pole chunky pixie fest. “Father Christmas” is a Dickensian dream of a snotnose English rant about the crushing weight of capitalist fervor heaped upon this once solemn, and to some, holy holiday. It is also about hooligans mugging the neighborhood Santa, because they don’t need any of his “silly toys” that should instead be given to “the little rich boys.”

Songwriter and vocalist, Ray Davies, who sings ‘Gimmie your money!” with unnerving glee, spent a lengthy career as leader of the seminal British rock band, the Kinks penning themes, concepts, and full albums exploring the odd meanness and weird aspects of the human condition. In 1977, he took on the voice of a Holden Caulfield-esque urchin primed to rob the corner Santa of whatever charity money he may have successfully entreated from the locals.

Behind its raucous guitars and infectious rhythm, the song cuts deep into the underlying troubles with consumer madness, turning the concept of giving into wanting and the idea of presents as fiduciary obligation. And all of it is anything but precious or preachy.

8. Silent Night – Sinéad O’Connor

We’ve settled on the most beautiful melody of the bunch here. “Silent Night,” originally titled in German, “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,” in 1818, when it was composed by a schoolteacher, Franz Xaver Gruber (music) and a Catholic priest, Joseph Mohr (lyrics), has been recorded an astronomical 137,000 times. Who counts this shit? Mohr’s childlike rhymes, in an almost seesaw couplet, are sweet, but pale when floating upon the gorgeous notes below them. It is the music that evokes the proper reverence of its subject matter.

The spiritually dulcet finesse of Sinéad O’Connor’s voice, (in its absolute prime in 1991), underscores the song’s passionate solemnity. It’s as if it were written for her – the subtle modulation of her pristine phrasing is stunning. Why not? This a woman who was a Catholic priest and as a kid was routinely chased down Dublin streets by schoolteachers.

\The emotionally urgent nature in which O’Connor approached her songs, and the bevy she’d interpreted, were all part of a lifelong battle she waged for the oppressed. Her preternatural expression of unbound empathy that was silenced forever just two years ago fills this elegant ballad with a gravitas that floors me every time.

7. Sleigh Ride – The Ronnettes

This is another one that appears on this list based purely on one performance. There is no version of this, none, that remotely compares to the ebulliently festive restation of this airy ode to a wintry activity penned in the middle of a heatwave by composer Leory Anderson in 1946. Anderson, who worked at the Pentagon after his service in World War II, when most of the beloved holiday songs were written and recorded, was primarily known for instrumentals, but in 1950, publisher Mills Music commissioned Tin Pan Alley stalwart, Mitchell Parish to add jubilant lyrics with some thematic input from Anderson.

To become a holiday standard, however, it took a 1963 recording by the Ronettes for Phil Spector’s brilliantly conceived and executed, A Christmas Gift for You, the greatest of all holiday-themed albums, to embed it in our seasonal psyches. On the strength of Ronnie Spector’s furious belting, “Sleigh Ride” eventually reached #8 on the U.S. pop charts that year. Featuring the resounding Wall of Sound, replete with signature clip-clop and whinny of the horses at its prelude to the phalanx of bells echoing its clarion call from car radios and storefronts, it is arguably Spector’s finest work during his halcyon period of pop domination. This is, of course, years before he went mad and shot a woman in the face, but that’s for another column, so grab some eggnog and turn this baby up!

6. I’ll Be Home for Christmas – Sarah McLachlan

As noted above, most of the secular holiday songs that reverberate around our skulls for at least two months a year were originally composed and recorded during World War II – somber if not heartfelt odes to returning safely from foreign shores to be with those for whom the boys were fighting, home, hearth, and good cheer. Of all those, the 1942-penned, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” hits every emotional touchstone with a spectacularly tender reveal in its refrain. Mainly because it is literally a letter sung as the song’s narrator during wartime.

Inspired by an actual poem written by noted doo-wop songwriter, Buck Ram, (“Only You,” “The Great Pretender,” “Twilight Time,” “The Magic Touch”) in 1922 as a gift to his mother and taken on by Jersy-ite lyricist, by way of Brooklyn, Kim Gannon and film composer, Walter Kent, it rings true. Considering the density of its subject, soldiers at war, they got Mr. Christmas, Bing Crosby to croon it, which predictably, considering his track record for such songs (again, higher on this list) catapulted it into a Top 10 hit.

For my money, singer-songwriter, Sarah McLachlan’s sultry voice dancing above a gentle piano bed, crushes this tear-jerker with the kind of vulnerability it deserves. The centerpiece of her 2006 Wintersong album, she whispers, “I’ll be home for Christmas… if only in my dreams,” and I’m toast.

5. “The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas to You)” – Nat King Cole

For all intents (and there are many with these songs) and purposes (essentially the same thing), this is the ultimate Christmas song. For one, it’s cleverly titled, “The Christmas Song,” but it’s also chock full of direct references to cool shit we dig about this time of year jammed into ONE VERSE! You know, roasting chestnuts, tiny tots with eyes aglow, presents beneath the tree. ONE VERSE! Oh, there’s a bridge about Santa (calm down, this song is not about Santa!), but even that is the font of brevity.

Written, once again, by two Jewish guys, Robert Wells and Mel Tormé, in the middle of the summer (what is it about heatwaves that make people yearn for “jack frost nipping at your nose” – no air conditioning?), its 1945 post-war ambiance of blessed relief abounds with reuniting the wanderers back into the fold.

But then, one year later, here comes Nat King Cole, who records the seminal version. From the opening lines, he owns this sucker, lock, stock and barrel. It is difficult to think of another holiday song, or any song, that is a better marriage of tune and voice than Cole and this one. An accomplished jazz pianist and smooth vocalist for his trio, the then 27-year-old Cole insisted that Capital Records provide him a small string section to accompany him, and, the rest, as they say, is holiday history. 

4. Silver Bells – Burl Ives

For years, this was my favorite holiday song. It brims with the sights and sounds of the big city, my hometown of NYC, where I spent those precious childhood years of dreaming and waiting and hoping for Santa Claus to arrive, and when awaking at an ungodly hour before the sun’s rise meant the world. Those weeks leading up to Christmas morning were the best. And “Silver Bells” took me there, time and again. “City sidewalks, busy sidewalks / Dressed in holiday style / In the air / There’s a feeling of Christmas.” Laughing kids, bustling streets, and everyone (at least in a child’s imagination) is smiling on every street corner. Which was not the usual fare in the Bronx.

All of it serenaded by silver bells. Whatever the hell that is. You know who may know? Two more Jewish guys, Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, who wrote the song for the 1950 Bob Hope film of the same name. Another Tin Pan Alley gig for two pros who only knew about the secular aspects of the holiday, the Americanized version, if you will.

I don’t love traditional versions of these songs, and Burl Ives holds sway in my decaying memory banks for his turn as the narrating snowman in the Rankin/Bass Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special from the early ‘60s. Hearing his well-traveled folky tones on any song conjures holiday cheer.

3. Happy Xmas (War is Over) – John Lennon and Yoko Ono

When John Lennon, and new bride, fellow artist/activist Yoko Ono, wrote and recorded this call for peace it was during that frantic period when the ex-Beatle wanted his songs to be like newspaper articles; fresh, immediate and relevant. This may be why a wholly original and painstaking craftsman fully nicked its melody from the traditional English ballad, “Stewball.” Nevertheless, Lennon and Ono nail the sentiment of pacifist utopia set to truly ebullient soundscapes engineered by that font of Christmas bombast, Phil Spector (another Jewish guy, by the way).

The “war is over” refrain, sung by the pre-teen Harlem Community Choir is the highlight – the war in question, Viet Nam, which was a half-decade old, despite every corner of American politics claiming to have a plan to end it. Lennon and Ono, who tenderly whisper a holiday message to their children, Julian and Kyoko to begin the recording, put the onus on the “want” rather than the “need,” which is the other side of holiday consumerism traded in for an elusive reverie of faith. Lennon, no longer hoping we can “imagine” a world without violence, enacted it in song. Pretty neat trick, if you can swing it.

2. White Christmas – Bing Crosby

And so, we get to the “historical significance” part of this list, because while “White Christmas” doesn’t floor me, it is arguably the most important holiday song ever conceived, written and recorded. Before Irving Berlin, the first Jewish guy to tackle the secular Christmas concept, composed this song, there was no such thing. That’s right. Berlin invented the modern Christmas song. This is it. First for a movie of the same name, and as a result he turned Bing Crosby from pop crooner into Mr. Christmas in one fell swoop. The song, which has been covered, played and sold more than any other in the long history of popular music (holiday or otherwise), topped the charts year-after-year, prompting the copy-cat greed of the music biz to get on the snow/presents/eggnog bandwagon and start cranking out the holiday junk food.

When researching other books written about one song for my Take a Sad Song – the Emotional Currency of Hey Jude back in 2020, my friend, singer-songwriter Eric Hutchinson suggested I read Jody Rosen’s excellent, White Christmas: The Story of an American Song. So, now it’s my turn. Read this book. It will blow your socks off.

As far as Crosby, he sells the thing like a pro, but, again, not a big fan. But I am a fan of a man whose religion and culture marked him as an outcast in a supposed free society, and despite being reminded every year around this time of this, decided, “Fuck it, I’m going to circumvent the whole thing and create something from whole cloth with my colossal talent.”  

1. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas – Billie Eilish

And yet another classic penned during WWII, and for yet another movie, Meet Me in St. Louis, songwriters Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane created the simplest, most direct sentiment imaginable for the season. Whatever creed, race, generation, be merry, exhale, “let your heart be light” and believe, if, in fact “the fates allow” that we’ll all be together, which is so very true. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” reminds us that life and happiness and family is not guaranteed for anyone. We must pursue it with vigilance and cherish its presence. For it is here, then it is gone. The crucial line, of course, being “Until then, we’ll muddle through somehow,” which Frank Sinatra refused to sing because it wasn’t “jolly enough.”

But what Ol’ Blues Eyes missed is the underlying beauty of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” These holidays arrive at the end of each year., which for many of us, means we take stock of our lives, our triumphs and tragedies, who and what we ‘ve lost and what we have gained, our past, present and future clashing into each other. When I hear this song, this is what I take from it. And this is not even marking its enchanting melody that when singing it (my wife and I give it a whirl on occasion) reveals itself as an airtight, indestructible masterwork that gets into your bones and stays there within three friggin’ minutes! The interlude about “olden/golden days” is high craft, folks.

I have recently become enamored with Billi Eilish’s version from a December 2023 Saturday Night Live in which she embraces the intimate quality of the song’s romanticism with an adoring veneration. Her whispered opening of the word, have in both verses reminds us that lullabies are not just for children, but the child in us all.