Have Yourself an Indie Little Christmas

Sally Shapiro at Christmas time, by Frida Klingberg

Christmas music didn’t end with Mariah in 1994.

The two Christmas releases I have spent the most time with this holiday season demand the most time. Have Yourself a Merry Indie Christmas Volume 1 and Volume 2 collect 104 tracks between them, and while it’s not all equally good, a lot of it is excellent. Collectively, the two volumes available only on Bandcamp make a case for contemporary, indie Christmas music.

Conventional wisdom is that nostalgia is the beating heart of Christmas music and that nobody wants to hear anything new. In The New York Times, Ben Sisario quoted outspoken producer David Foster as asserting:

No. 1: The public prefers the old classics, and isn’t too interested in new songs.

No. 2: Singers shouldn’t wander too far from the melody.

No. 3: “You can’t be too corny at Christmas. You totally get a free pass.” 

But the way Kelly Clarkson’s “Underneath the Tree” and Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me” are creeping up the holiday charts challenges that theory. They’re not new new—2013 and 2014 respectively—but they’re fresh compared with “All I Want For Christmas is You” (1994), which is relatively new compared with the other Christmas songs currently in Billboard’s Top Ten—“Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” by Brenda Lee (1958), “Jingle Bell Rock” by Bobby Helms (1957), “Holly Jolly Christmas” by Burl Ives (1964), and “Last Christmas” by Wham! (1984).

The songs on Have Yourself a Merry Indie Christmas won’t chart anytime soon, but that’s not their goal. They give us artists interacting with Christmas not to create the soundtrack for tree trimming but to reflect on their lives and culture the way they do the rest of the year. Art can do many things, but if it only does one thing, it responds to the artists’ lives and the world around them, and Christmas is a big economic, emotional, and totemic part of life in Christian-influenced cultures.

Some of these songs fit obviously in that category. The Hitsville Drunks’ “JC Says JC,” features Jesus Christ taking his own name in vain when he sees what a mess we’ve made of the world, but there are also a lot of love songs, brokenhearted songs, and desperate life songs. I’ve returned regularly to “Christmas in Berlin” by Nick Faye and The Deputies, which gives us a rock-forward Americana (or maybe an Americana-forward rock) story of a couple who think that things will be better if they can just get through the holidays.

You also hear the classic Christmas tropes updated here as well. Many of the classics starting with ‘White Christmas” are about being alone or away at Christmas, and “Christmas Time in Bossier City” by Shinyribs translates that to a trucker stuck in North Louisiana trying to make something of a lonely Christmas Eve.

The Pocket Gods are in the collection with “Apocalyptic Christmas,” but their 2022 Christmas single, “All I Want For Christmas Is For Someone To Buy My £1 Million Album,” is part of the band’s ongoing war with Spotify. Upset at the poor rates Spotify pays, they’ve released an album and a few singles of 30-second songs since 30 seconds of play counts as a stream. The rate is so low, bandleader Mark Christopher Lee can’t see a reason to make longer songs. This year’s single is a reference to a one-of-one vinyl album that sells for £1 million, and if it sells, he wants to use the proceeds to launch a new, streaming service that pays musicians fairly.

That’s an extreme version of writing about what’s on their minds. Few if any artists on the Have Yourself a Merry Indie Christmas are so overtly political. Les Bicyclettes de Belsize embrace Foster’s nostalgia but makes it specific to singer/songwriter Charlie Darling’s life on “A Very Indie Christmas.” He’s nostalgic for the bands and records that meant something to him such as British indie rock pioneers The Primitives, The Orchids, and Steven Duffy.

The two sets collectively show artists making music that reflects their relationships to Christmas and, by extension, offering their peers an alternative to trying to hear their lives and stories in songs by Sinatra, Andy Williams, Perry Como, and other singers whose songs and experiences happened 50-plus years ago. That doesn’t mean those songs have nothing to say anymore, but The Detox Twins singing “Time is an invention of the Internet” on “I Don’t Like Christmas (But I Love the Sound)” speaks specifically and directly to people who have never known life without the Web and who have rich, complicated relationships with and through the Internet that their parents can’t imagine.

In the big picture, Foster’s right. Old Christmas songs easily outsell and outstream newer ones, but in an increasingly fragmented cultural landscape, but all the contemporary activity says that there’s more to Christmas than the good old days and good old songs.

Consumer guide note: The albums are also incredibly good deals. They’re £7, which considering the current exchange rate, is a great deal. Proceeds go to Crisis, a British non-profit that helps the homeless during the holidays, so your expenditure is going to a good cause.

Interested in more on indie rock Christmas music? Try ChristmasUnderground.com for starters. Also, I talked to Christmas Underground’s Jim Goodwin on last week’s episode of our Twelve Songs of Christmas podcast. This week’s episode features Charlie Darling and Kevin McGrath, who compiled Have Yourself a Very Indie Christmas.