Traditionally, Christmas songs from anywhere in the world are inspiring, heartwarming and polarising – or at least North Pole-arising. The New Zealand musical Christmas tradition is exceptional in many ways, but still manages to bring people together while dividing their opinions. It adds an unambiguous Kiwi touch to the seasonal singalong. See if you can spot the common theme in these New Zealand Christmas song lyrics:
There’s no snow at Christmas
In the South Pacific summertime
The only white that’s ever seen
Is cricket on a bowling green
– Down Under Santa Gets a Suntan
Don’t want a Christmas that’s knee deep in snow
That’s a Christmas that I’ll never know
– Pōhutukawa Christmas Tree
We don’t get snow like some places we know
The barbie’s hot and the pace is real slow
– You Are Christmas
As the evening sky’s slowly turning red
There ain’t no vision of a snow-lined roof in my head
– Pōhutukawa Xmas
There won’t be any snow to make the land look white
The sun won’t set down south till after 9 at night
– Christmas in New Zealand
It does not snow upon these islands at Christmas time, and there are musicians aplenty to remind us of the fact.
Putting the Kiwi into Christmas music in this way is a relatively recent trend, according to musical archivist Grant Gillanders, who has compiled two CDs of local seasonal songs, Pōhutukawas & Pavlova and Merry Christmas New Zealand.
“Probably from the 2000s onwards, they seem to be mostly about the pōhutukawa and beaches and pavlovas, as opposed to before when it was all about snow and sleigh rides,” says Gillanders. “There’s not many Christmas songs pre-2000 or even earlier that mention Kiwi Christmases.”
Call it a mark of cultural maturity that we now have our very own carols that honour jandals and barbies instead of jingles and bells. But like other tunes on the global Christmas playlist, the local versions stick to a few well-worn tropes. And there’s a good reason for that. One of Christmas music’s essential functions is to remind us of the good times with family and friends that we aim to repeat every year when we get back together for the holiday.
The songs need to be familiar and traditional because Christmas is about familiarity and tradition. There’s a big lyrical focus on going home. From Darlene Love’s Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) to Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody to John Rowles’ It’s Christmas All Over the World (almost unbelievably, his only Christmas song) – they all want to take you back.
The other side of the coin hidden in this pudding is that if your Christmas memories are less than glowing, then musical triggers are likely to induce despondency and regret rather than delight and rapture. Fortunately, the corporate music industry has gone to some lengths to cater for this disgruntled market sector, with the melancholy likes of Wham’s Last Christmas and Nat King Cole’s The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot.
Listening in
But there’s more to ensuring a Christmas hit than pushing a few emotional buttons. And thankfully, there’s a musicologist with a computer to tell us exactly how much more. In a paper titled “Data Analysis of Musical and Lyric Traits in the UK’s Favourite Christmas Songs”, Berklee College of Music professor Joe Bennett describes an analysis of the top 200 songs on UK Spotify in the week of December 25, 2016. He found 78 were Christmas related, with the most popular lyric themes being home, lost love, partying, Santa, snow, religion and peace on Earth; 95% of the songs were in a major key; 90% were in 4/4 time; 49% featured sleigh bells and 10% were by Michael Bublé.
These lessons, and several others, appear to have been fully absorbed in a new seasonal offering simply titled Christmas, from Cher. It is produced by Mark Taylor, the man who changed the course of her history when he first put her voice through a vocoder in 1998.
“I had no intention of doing a Christmas album,” deadpanned Cher to Billboard, as though snow wouldn’t melt in her mouth. And yet, somehow … here we are, with evidence of a massive amount of effort to create this recording. A sort of Gypsies, Elves and Thieves, this is a product – there’s no other word for it – that rings all of them Christmas bells. They’ve stuffed everything into this sack. There’s even a lapse into taste with a cover of the Zombies’ This Will Be Our Year, which, although not a Christmas song, has lyrics that encapsulate all the warmest fuzzies of the season.
Admittedly, only 8% of the album – one song – is performed with Michael Bublé, but there are also pairings with Stevie Wonder, Cyndi Lauper and Darlene Love herself, in a version of Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).
Cher’s release joins the likes of other Christmas albums that feature among the minor offerings of major music figures: Elvis, the Beatles, the Beach Boys and Bob Dylan all turned out seasonal product. Here, Split Enz, Larry’s Rebels and The Fourmyula have presented Xmas offerings with varying degrees of seriousness.
A great little earner
Most performers do it because a Christmas hit is a great little earner that can have a long elf-life. The right song will swing back into action every 12 months to top up your superstar’s Christmas Club account.
Local offerings may not attract six-figure royalties every year, but it’s not because there aren’t enough of them to have a fighting chance.
“I like Christmas music,” says compiler Gillanders, which is just as well because, “On my original list, there were about 320 songs that I put on a spreadsheet.”
His project had an appropriate nativity. “Christmas is pretty big in our house because my wife Carol is a Christmas Day baby. Ever since we were married, I’ve made mix tapes for Christmas. And each year I change it. And as the years went by, more and more Kiwi stuff started replacing the Bing Crosbys and all that.”
So a few years back, Christmas came extremely early for Gillanders. He spent six months playing through most of the 320 songs and refining the choices for what became Pohutukawas & Pavlovas, a 33-ditty compilation released in 2012 and with selections dating back to 1949.
“People thought I was mad because I just played them all the time. People walking past the house or my car would have heard Christmas songs in the middle of June.”
From the historically significant – that 1949 entry, Best Wishes, by Pixie Williams – to the defiantly quirky – Billy T James’s (We Wanna Wish You a) Māori Christmas – the album mixes local and overseas offerings across all sorts of styles.
P&P was followed up in 2020 with a second complement of the season, as it were. Merry Christmas New Zealand was inspired partly by a RNZ competition inviting people to write a Christmas song in eight weeks, which produced a number that were so good Gillanders wanted to save them for posterity.
Merry Christmas also includes a fashionably meta number: When Mariah Sings, by Wellingtonian Gareth Curtis, is a Christmas song about Christmas songs – “the songs we love to hate to love”.
As well as traditional, serious offerings, Gillanders’ compilations include such novelties as radio promotional efforts by various Good Guys and Pirates. Jordan Luck’s Pavlova Song, in which he sings the recipe for the dessert, is no mere trifle.
Fortunately for Gillanders, he has a temperament that can accommodate such frivolities. “Christmas still brings out the best in people,” he says. “It’s probably quite cathartic to a lot of people to do a Christmas song.”
He also has the knowledge to put Christmas offerings in perspective. He sees Rosy Parsons’ 1999 Christmas In New Zealand as a landmark in the genre and a standard in the making. “A lot of people don’t know about it, but it is getting traction,” he says. “I think that’s a good sign when we start covering our own Christmas songs. I think that means we’ve turned a corner.”
According to audioculture.co.nz, the song is more commonly known by Dennis Marsh’s version from his 2001 album of that name. It “was revived in 2016 with an all-star line-up based around the news team from TV3′s Story, accompanied by a diverse bunch of celebrities including Frankie Stevens, Dennis Marsh, United Future leader Peter Dunne, chef Nadia Lim, Briscoes lady Tammy Wells and radio host Joe Cotton; proceeds went to the Kaikōura earthquake appeal.”
Yet Gillanders has not exhausted the supply of Christmas kiwiana. I Don’t Know What to Get You for Christmas (Do I Really Love You?), released in December 2021 by Wellington group Hans Pucket, earns a place on any local list by tunefully avoiding seasonal clichés while still acknowledging the need to get home for Christmas.
Slow & mellow
For those averse to Christmas music there is really no escape, especially if you go to the mall. You can try to block Santa on your Spotify but you can’t hide from the Royal Guardsmen, whose Snoopy’s Christmas is a case of on overseas song that became a hit here but is seldom heard elsewhere. (See also, Ten Guitars.)
Nor will you get far into the forecourt before hearing a whole bunch of 80s pop stars, many of whom are remembered now only because they were in the famine-busting favourite Do They Know It’s Christmas/Feed the World, perhaps the most ironic song ever to be played in a retail environment.
Westfield failed to respond to requests to be interviewed for this story, but it’s no secret that mall management have standards. Especially Christmas standards. They prefer their selections to be on the slow side. It’s been claimed that up-tempo numbers inspire shoppers to move too fast. A mellower speed is likely to slow them down so that they spend more time in the store.
Not all the elves are happy about having to listen. Complaints from workers about having to put up with the selection seem to start earlier every year.
Repetition of the same tune may make shop assistants unhappy but it is what puts a smile on the faces of management because, as we have seen, it is the familiar that customers crave at this time of year. Variety is the kiss of death, so there is no point putting together a playlist of rare and delightful obscurities.
Which is what avuncular music luminary William Dart has been doing for a few friends for many years – in fact, the 2023 edition of his lovingly curated Santa CD mix tape will be the 40th. His knowledge of all kinds of music is second to none. He’s made many lists and checked them twice and he draws on them all to make his informal compilations.
“A lot of people, when I give it to them, just think they’re ordinary Christmas songs,” says Dart. “They don’t really realise it is an alternative list. It’s emphatically not what you can hear in malls.”
He is showing no signs of running out of material, even after nearly half a century.
“There is a mixture, and I do audition it quite severely. I start off with a list of maybe 150 songs and whittle it down. When you live with them, you realise some songs don’t work past a couple of listenings. But the best are so fresh you can love them every time.”
The recipients also love the collections, which are thoughtfully compiled to cater for all sensibilities.
“I had a song by The Frogs called Here Comes Santa’s Pussy. And I did sound people out as to whether they wanted [the CD] with or without Santa’s Pussy. A lot of people demurred and said, ‘Yes, you could leave that off.’”
It’s just as well Dart accepts limits because if left to his own devices … “I have something like 1800 different versions of Jingle Bells, played on everything from brass bands to rubber bands. With the Santa CDs a couple of years ago, I put in a Jinglemania CD, which was 80 minutes of Jingle Bells by different people, which didn’t, frankly, go down very well. People positively hated it.Christmas playlist, go here
“I did suggest to Concert FM that I could have an all-night Jingle Bells programme which would run for six or seven hours. They weren’t really interested.”
Pohutukawas & Pavlova and Merry Christmas New Zealand are often available at Marbecks and JB Hi-Fi.